Development of the Childhood Nonverbal Communication Scale.
A new 37-item parent checklist reliably tracks nonverbal skills in Persian infants under 18 months.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Oryadi-Zanjani (2020) built a new 37-item checklist for babies.
Parents of 1,200 Iranian infants months filled it out.
The team checked if the scores lined up with an older infant scale.
What they found
The new scale scored 0.965 on internal consistency. That is near-perfect.
It also matched well with the older scale, showing it measures the same skills.
How this fits with other research
Lin et al. (2015) did the same job in Taiwan. They also got strong numbers for the Chinese CSBS DP.
Parks (1983) warned that early autism scales often lack solid validity. The new CNCS now fills that gap with clear evidence.
Narzisi et al. (2013) showed the CBCL 1½-5 can spot autism in toddlers. The CNCS adds a tool for the even younger 0-18 month window.
Why it matters
You now have a quick parent form that works for Persian-speaking babies. Use it to flag delays before words come. Early catch means early help.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The aim of this study was to develop and validate the Childhood Nonverbal Communication Scale (CNCS) to assess nonverbal communication skills in children from birth to 18 months old. An extensive review of existing research provided evidence used to generate items representative of nonverbal communication behaviors. The final version of the CNCS includes 37 items divided in two dimensions (CNCS-1 and CNCS-2) showing high content validity (item-rated content validity index ≥ 0.75). The scale was administered to 428 Iranian Persian-speaking children 3 to 18 months old with normal development. According to the findings, the CNCS showed strong internal consistency (KR-20 = 0.965). Further, it had good convergent validity based on a significant correlation between total scores and the results of the Persian version of the Production of Infant Scale Evaluation (PRISE-P) (r = 0.5, P < 0.01). Therefore, the CNCS is a promising tool for measuring nonverbal communication in Iranian children from birth to 18 months of age.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2020 · doi:10.1007/s10803-019-04356-8