Children's Communication Checklist (CCC) scores in 11‐year‐old children with communication impairments

Background : The pragmatic skills of children with communication disorders and their assessment are currently an issue for speech and language therapy and educational placement. Aims : To explore whether different subgroups of children with communication disorders score differently on the Children's Communication Checklist (CCC) and to study how they compare with published normative data. Methods & Procedures : A sample of 161 eleven‐year‐old children with a history of communication disorders was assessed using the CCC. The main use of this questionnaire was to establish whether pragmatic impairments were part of a child's communication difficulty. Although the checklist was originally designed for research purposes, normative data for this scale have been recently published as well as group data from a number of different clinical groups. Whilst the present CCC data have been previously reported descriptively for a wider sample, they have not been examined in terms of subgroups or compared directly with normative information and similarly diagnosed individuals from other studies. Outcomes & Results : Of the children assessed, 52 (33%) scored in the normal range (within 1 SD) on the pragmatic scale, 40 (26%) fell between 1 and 2 SD below the normative mean, and 64 (41%) scored below 2 SD of the mean of typically developing children (aged 6–16 years). Thus, the majority (67%) scored out of the normal range for pragmatic skill at 11 years of age. The cohort was separated into four diagnostic subcategories: those with a definite diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder ( n =15); those with typical specific language impairment ( n =82); generally impaired ( n =37); and those with a clinical history of primary pragmatic language impairment (independent of CCC score, n =27). Conclusions : Findings show that those generally impaired and with specific language impairment were less impaired than the other groups on the CCC pragmatic scale. There was a significant trend for those with autistic spectrum disorders to score lowest through pragmatic language impairment, generally impairment to specific language impairment. It is argued that a cut‐off of 140 may prove more useful at this age than the 132 level previously published for 8 year olds. Results suggest that the CCC can be used as a clinical tool, but in conjunction with other reliable measures.