Assessing intentional communication in deaf toddlers

This study examines the eliciting potential of two tasks, one for proto-imperative and another for protodeclarative communicative intentions. The task to elicit proto-imperative utterances and the scoring form are partially based on Casby and Cumpata's (1986) Protocol for the Assessment of Prelinguistic Intentional Communication (PAPIC). However, a number of modifications are proposed for use with young deaf children. For the protodeclaratives, a new eliciting task called Tac-Tic was created. These tasks were offered to 18 normally developing profoundly deaf toddlers at the ages of 18, 24, and 30 months. Results indicate that both tasks possess sufficient eliciting potential to measure both the prelinguistic and early linguistic "illocutionary force" of profoundly deaf children. Moreover, the new eliciting task Tac-Tic seems to have a higher eliciting potential than the corresponding task used in the PAPIC. For clinical aims, a more adapted and more efficient scoring form than the one Casby and Cumpata used was created.