The German Baby-Komm - development of parent questionnaire

From very early on, infants participate in communicative interaction and can understand some highly frequent words at the age of 6 months. However, it is not until 12 months that nonverbal communicative behavior, such as a pointing gesture, can be identified. In parental surveys assessing children’s early language development (e.g. MCDI), only few of these later conventionalized nonverbal behaviors are considered.

In this project we develop a a novel parental questionnaire the purpose of which is to assess infants’ early manner of communication at the age of 8–10 months.

This is to our knowledge the first parental questionnaire to assess the scope of infants’ communication shortly before the acquisition of vocabulary at this very young age of 8-10 months.