A systematic review of assessment instruments for linguistic precursors during child development, ages 6 to 18 months

Abstract

Linguistic precursors (gaze, joint attention, gestures, social interaction, etc.) have a predictive value over the course of child development. The aim of the present review is to analyze the content structure, and the theoretical perspective, of assessment instruments that focus on linguistic precursors for the 6–18-month age group. The search was achieved through the following citation databases: BVS, MEDLINE/PubMed, Web of Science, SciELO, Redalyc, Web of Science, Google Scholar, as well as the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). Elegible articles were obtained using the following terms: "neuropsychological tests," "nonverbal communication," "child language" and "infant" as well as their equivalents in Spanish and Portuguese. Twenty-six assessment instruments were found to be compatible with the eligibility criteria. From the results, 19 instruments explore various domains of linguistic precursors, while 7 are task-specific proposals. Five instruments are aimed at early detection of signs of Autistic Spectrum Disorder. The implementation of Bruner’s model of communicative functions was found on 15% of the instruments. This article provides timely information for clinicians who work with children during early stages of development, in relation to the methodical monitoring, assessment and accompaniment of infants and toddlers during the prelinguistic stage.

Keywords:

• Child development assessment
• gestures
• language development
• nonverbal communication
• prelinguistic functioning

Acknowledgments

To the professors of the class "Produção de Artigos Científicos" of the Postgraduate Program (PhD) in Psychology of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte/Brazil for teaching the theoretical and methodological principles of literature reviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The review code on the Ryyan platform is 584523, title: Systematic review of instruments assessing pre-linguistic functioning in child development.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES)/Brazil, under Grant [process 88887.476291/2020-00].