Developing Dovyko I: The Czech Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory

Objectives. This article reports on the adaptation procedure of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI): Words & Gestures into Czech. The parental-report questionnaire screens communicative development in infants aged 8 to 18 months and focuses on general communicative skills, active and passive vocabulary, and communicative gestures. The content of the Czech adaptation needs to reflect the communicative practices specific to the Czech language and cultural environment. Methods. The final item list for the questionnaire was developed by combining a variety of methods including translations, parental diaries from 44 caregivers an expert focus group, and a corpus survey. The preliminary questionnaire was piloted in two rounds, altogether in 95 Czech caregivers and 100 children. Preliminary content was drawn from translations and parental diaries. These items were reduced based on assessment of child-development experts and frequency in four Czech-language corpora. Item analysis was conducted after each of the pilot rounds to remove from the final content words or gestures which were infrequently checked. Conclusions. This process assured that the Czech CDI screens communicative development on items relevant to the Czech linguistic and social landscape. As such, Do vyko I offers a powerful tool to measure communicative development in local children and may also find use in research of children with different developmental and linguistic characteristics. Limitations. The questionnaire is designed as a complement to other existing methods of communicative screening. The tool thus does not serve for final diagnosis but may help indicate an area problematic for the child or motivate further medical, cognitive, or linguistic assessment. The norming, validity, and reliability studies, which have been completed with Czech-speaking families, are not described in this article but separately in the tools manual.