The correspondence between parent report and child performance for receptive and expressive vocabulary beyond infancy

Abstract

Parent judgement of their toddler's receptive and expressive vocabulary skills was compared with children's laboratory performance on comprehension and production language tasks. Parents reviewed two separate sets of pictures. For one set they were asked whether their child would recognize the named member of each of 35 pairs of pictured items. For the other set, they were asked whether their child would be able to verbalize each of the pictured objects or actions. After the parent completed each task, the child was tested on the same items. Parents also completed the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI), which includes a broader index of expressive vocabulary. The results indicated significant correspondence between parent report and child judgement for comprehension ( r = 0.55) and for production ( r = 0.67). The CDI expressive vocabulary scale score also correlated with child performance on the expressive vocabulary task ( r = 0.78).