The Validation of a Scale to Measure Early Social- Communicative Behavior

Few language assessments are currently available which focus on prelinguistic social-communicative behavior. This paper discusses four studies intended to generate empirical evidence on the validity of a measure designed to assess prelinguistic communicative behavior. The measure elicits social-communicative behavior through the presentation of ten simple tasks. Both the concurrent and content validity of the elicited tasks were demonstrated through their use with infant and toddler-age developmentally delayed children.. The evolution of early social-commu-nicative behavior into symbolic language has been suggested by a number of investigator