The Children's Communication Checklist (CCC) was developed
to assess aspects of
communicative impairment that are not adequately evaluated by contemporary
standardised
language tests. These are predominantly pragmatic abnormalities seen in
social communication,
although other qualitative aspects of speech and language were also included.
Some items covering social relationships and restricted interests were
incorporated, so that
the relationship between pragmatic difficulties and other characteristics
of pervasive
developmental disorders could be explored. Checklist ratings were obtained
for 76 children
aged 7 to 9 years, all of whom had received special education for language
impairment. In 71
cases, 2 raters (usually a teacher and speech-language therapist) independently
completed the
checklist, making it possible to establish inter-rater reliability. From
an initial pool of 93
items, 70 items, grouped into 9 scales, were retained. Five of the subscales
were concerned
with pragmatic aspects of communication. A composite pragmatic impairment
scale formed
from these subscales had inter-rater reliability and internal consistency
of around .80. This
composite discriminated between children with a school diagnosis of semantic-pragmatic
disorder and those with other types of specific language impairment (SLI).
The majority of
children with pragmatic language impairments did not have any evidence
of restricted
interests or significant difficulties in the domains of social relationships.
