Assessment of communicative competence in children with severe developmental disorders

This chapter discusses the Communicative Competence Profile (CCP); a socio-neurocognitive assessment method which provides a reasoning and explanatory model to guide clinical decision making for goal setting in intervention on communicative competence for children with severe developmental disorders (SDD). The central underlying notion of the CCP is that information on the development and organization of communication and communicative competence in the brain provides insight in the overall development, learning capacity and more specifically language and literacy acquisition. The CCP helps to disentangle a combination of mutually reinforcing disorders. Research evidence is gathered from socio-neurocognitive studies, affording reasoning and explanatory schemes to substantiate goal setting for intervention. A clinical case study illustrates the application of the CCP