With the Inventarios, the Spanish adaptation of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs), professionals can tap into parents' invaluable day-to-day knowledge about their children's language and communication skills—and respond to legislation that requires parental input in child evaluations. Top language researchers developed these standardized, parent-completed report forms to assess language and communication skills in young children ages 8–30 months. They've designed the forms to focus on current behaviors and salient emergent behaviors that parents can recognize and track.
The Inventarios have three components:
Inventario II: Palabras y Enunciados. This "words and sentences" form is for use with children ages 16–30 months. In the first part of the form, parents document the child's production and use of hundreds of words divided into semantic categories similar to the ones on Inventario I. The second part analyzes the child's early forms of grammar and the complexity of the child's multi-word utterances. Parents identify the words the child has understood or used and provide written examples of the child's three longest utterances. This form generally takes 20–40 minutes to complete and 20–30 minutes to score by hand (it is also desktop scannable with the appropriate software).
User's Guide and Technical Manual. The manual for the Inventarios is written in English and provides detailed instructions for administering, scoring, and interpreting the forms; various uses of the inventories for clinical and research purposes; background information on the development of the forms; technical reports on reliability and validity; and tables and graphs of norming data.
Numerous studies document the reliability and validity, clinical utility, and research potential of the CDIs and Inventarios. The CDIs were normed on approximately 1,800 children in three locations, and the Inventarios were normed on more than 2,000 children. The CDI and Inventario forms were developed separately to reflect the vocabulary and grammatical structure of each language.