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The Key Skill Elements of Early Communication

The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) for children birth to age 3 is a sensitive, easy to obtain marker of progress towards  attaining proficiency in communication (e.g., Luze et al., 2001). The ECI is a brief, repeatable, play-based, observational measure of a child’s communicative performance during a loosely structured 6-minute play period with a familiar adult. The play session is standardized around one of two alternate toys forms - either the Fisher-Price House or Farm.

The four communicative behaviors or Key Skill Elements selected and validated in research make up the ECI's total communication indicator: Gestures, Vocalizations, Single Words, and Multiple Words. These skills were initally selected based on a conceptual review of the literature and confirmed through validation with other criterion measures of expressive communication. These skills were selected to represent the prelinguistic domain (Gestures and Vocalilzations) and the spoken or signed language domain (Single and Multiple Words)

Skill elements that were not included because they did not add to the sensitivity of the ECI based on research were: Coordinated Attention, because of its low frequency of occurrence and difficulty obtaining inter-observer agreement, and Social Attention or eye contact, because it did not show growth over time.  We now turn to a brief overview of the ECI Key Skill Element definitions. Detailed definitions are described in the ECI Scoring Definitions.

Brief Overview of Skill Definitions

Gestures:
Gestures are physical movements made by the child in an attempt to communicate with the partner. Examples include: Giving, reaching toward an adult, pushing away, pointing, showing, nodding head, taking something, etc.

See if you can identify the gestures in the following video clip (All video on this site requires Windows Media Player 7.1 or higher. If you don't already have it, download it here for free.):

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Play high-quality video clip (Est. download time: dial-up = 3:45min; broadband= 21sec)

Vocalizations:
Vocalizations are non-word verbal utterances voiced by the child to the play partner. They may occur alone or with gestures. Examples include babbling, cooing, “ah,” da,” animal sounds, etc.

Words:
Utterances containing recognizable words are counted as one of two types – Single or Multiple Words. Single Word Utterances are individual words voiced or signed by the child that are recognized and understood by the person hearing them. Multiple Word Utterances are simply two or more different words voiced or signed by the child in an utterance that are understood by the person hearing them. To count as multiple word utterances, the words should fit together in a meaningful way to approximate a statement or sentence. At least two or more of the words need to be understandable. They don’t need to be grammatically correct. Sign language for multiple words are included in this definition.

See if you can identify the four types of communication (gestures, vocalizations, single word utterances, and multiple word utterances) in this video clip:

Play lower-quality video clip (Est. download time: dial-up = 40sec; broadband= 5sec)
Play high-quality video clip (Est. download time: dial-up = 6min; broadband= 30sec)

ECI Total Communication:
Total communication, which is the combination of each child’s gestures, vocalizations, single and multiple words, is used as the primary ECI indicator. When measured repeatedly (e.g., montly or quarterly), it provides a practical measure of progress toward learning to communicate. Examination of growth in the individual key elements ( secondary indicators) enables a look at growth in each key skill and exactly which skills the child is using to communicate. These indicators are designed to inform you about whether this child is on-track, when a change in intervention is needed, and if intervention changes result in changes in ECI Total Communication.