Assessing Greek-speaking children's communication and language development from 6 to 36 months: norming and validation of a new parent-report screening tool

Norm-referenced parental reports have been successfully used to assess young children's communication and language development for over 20 years. Building on this tradition, a new parent-report tool, the Communication Development Report (CDR), was developed, validated, and standardized for screening communication and language development in children growing up in Greek-speaking families. The CDR is an online parent report instrument that permits the evaluation of early communicative behaviors (vocal and non-vocal), comprehension, productive vocabulary, inflectional morphology, and syntactic complexity. This paper aims to present the methodological steps followed for its development, validation, and standardization, as well as its psychometric properties as they emerged through this process. Results are presented based on a representative sample of 2102 children aged 6 to 36 months (Nmean= 70 children/month; 50.43% boys) concerning the CDR's factorial structure, internal consistency, convergent and divergent validity, as well as its concurrent validity and test-retest reliability. They also illustrate the developmental patterns of the communicative/linguistic dimensions assessed and report on the effect of several demographic factors on this development. Overall, results point to the CDR as a valid tool for the early screening of communication and language development of Greek-speaking infants and toddlers for clinical, educational, or research purposes.