Macarthur Communicative Development Inventories (Cdis): Complete Set of Macarthur Inventarios (User's Guide and Package of 25 of Each Form)

With the Inventarios, the Spanish adaptation of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs), professionals can tap into parents' invaluable day-to-day knowledge about their children's language and communication skills—and respond to legislation that requires parental input in child evaluations. Top language researchers developed these standardized, parent-completed report forms to assess language and communication skills in young children ages 8–30 months. They've designed the forms to focus on current behaviors and salient emergent behaviors that parents can recognize and track.

The Inventarios have three components:

Inventario I: Primeras Palabras y Gestos. This "words and gestures" form is for use with children ages 8–18 months. The first part of the form prompts parents to document the child's understanding of hundreds of early vocabulary items separated into semantic categories such as animal names, sound effects, and question words. Parents mark the words understood or used, and the form yields separate indexes of words understood and words produced. The second part of the form asks parents to record the communicative and symbolic gestures the child has tried or completed. This form generally takes 20–40 minutes to complete and 20–30 minutes to score by hand.

Inventario II: Palabras y Enunciados. This "words and sentences" form is for use with children ages 16–30 months. In the first part of the form, parents document the child's production and use of hundreds of words divided into semantic categories similar to the ones on Inventario I. The second part analyzes the child's early forms of grammar and the complexity of the child's multi-word utterances. Parents identify the words the child has understood or used and provide written examples of the child's three longest utterances. This form generally takes 20–40 minutes to complete and 20–30 minutes to score by hand (it is also desktop scannable with the appropriate software).

User's Guide and Technical Manual. The manual for the Inventarios is written in English and provides detailed instructions for administering, scoring, and interpreting the forms; various uses of the inventories for clinical and research purposes; background information on the development of the forms; technical reports on reliability and validity; and tables and graphs of norming data.

Numerous studies document the reliability and validity, clinical utility, and research potential of the CDIs and Inventarios. The CDIs were normed on approximately 1,800 children in three locations, and the Inventarios were normed on more than 2,000 children. The CDI and Inventario forms were developed separately to reflect the vocabulary and grammatical structure of each language.

Learn more about the Inventarios and the CDIs.

Donna Jackson-Maldonado, Ph.D., is a researcher who has lived in Mexico since her childhood. She is a bilingual specialist in monolingual and bilingual language development in children with different language disorders and those who are typically developing. She has developed several language assessment instruments, including the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories.

Donna J. Thal, Ph.D., holds a master of science degree in speech pathology and audiology from Brooklyn College and a doctorate in speech and hearing sciences from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research in Language at UCSD, an assistant professor at Hofstra University, and an assistant professor at Queens College of CUNY. Dr. Thal is a developmental psycholinguist and a certified and licensed speech-language pathologist who has conducted research in a number of areas, including normal and disordered development of language and cognition, children with focal brain injury, and children with delayed onset of language. She has also carried out studies of language development in Spanish-speaking infants and toddlers. Her most recent work focuses on early identification of risk for clinically significant language impairment and is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders (NIDCD), within the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Thal is an editorial consultant for language for the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research and the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. She was the California State nominee for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation Outstanding Clinical Achievement Award in 1996, received the Monty Distinguished Faculty Award from SDSU 1998 and the Albert W. Johnson Research Lecturer Award from SDSU in 1999, and was the Wang Family Excellence Award nominee from SDSU in 2000. She served a 4-year term on the Communicative Disorders Review Committee for the NIDCD from 1998 to 2002. Dr. Thal is a co-author of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories.

Larry Fenson, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University in California. Dr. Fenson has published research on infant attentiveness, early symbolic development, categorization, children's drawing skills, play, and early language development. He received his doctorate in child psychology from the University of Iowa. He served as Assistant Professor at the University of Denver and was a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development postdoctoral fellow with Jerome Kagan at Harvard University. Dr. Fenson is Chair of The CDI Advisory Board.

Virginia A. Marchman, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas. Dr. Marchman holds a master of arts degree and a doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research in Language at the University of California, San Diego. She has conducted research in several areas of language and cognitive development, language disorders, and early childhood development. Her most recent work focuses on the identification of precursors of language delay and individual differences in lexical and morphological development in monolingual English and bilingual (Spanish and English) speakers. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research and was named Distinguished Scholar at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders. Dr. Marchman has worked on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories and the MacArthur Inventarios del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas for the last 15 years. She is author of the CDI Scoring Program.

Tyler Newton, M.A., is teacher at Clover Flat Elementary School, Boulevard, California. Tyler Newton received bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees in psychology from San Diego State University. She obtained the California Multiple Subject Teaching Credential from San Diego State University in 2000 and currently teaches second and third grades at Clover Flat Elementary School in Boulevard, California. Her master's thesis involved work on the norming study for the MacArthur Inventarios del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas.

Barbara Conboy, Ph.D., is currently a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Mind, Brain & Learning at the University of Washington. She earned a doctorate in language and communicative disorders at the University of California, San Diego/San Diego State University; a Master of Arts degree in speech-language-hearing at Temple University; and a bachelor of arts in Latin American studies at Smith College. She is certified by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association as a speech-language pathologist and has worked extensively with bilingual children with language-learning disorders. Her research interests include early bilingualism, experiential factors in language acquisition and brain development, and the early identification and treatment of language impairment in bilingual children.

Dr. Bates was a founding member of the Cognitive Science Department at University of California at San Diego (the first of its kind in the world), the Director of the federally-funded UCSD Project in Cognitive and Neural Development, a founding co-director of the innovative Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders at San Diego State University and UCSD, and the Director of the Center for Research in Language and Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD. With strengths in developmental psychology, linguistics, neurology, and cognitive science, she carried out many creative and influential collaborative studies on the interrelations among language acquisition, brain function, symbolic growth, and other key aspects of development. During her extensive career, she directed cross-linguistic studies on 4 continents and authored or co-authored 10 books and more than 200 scientific publications. Her work was interdisciplinary, influencing diverse fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, biology, psychology, computer science, and medicine.