What the Evidence Does (and Does Not) Show for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Child Development Milestones: An Illustrative Example Using Expressive Vocabulary.

PURPOSE: Child development milestones are a critical tool for pediatricians and caregivers to use for developmental surveillance. Following review and selection by a panel of subject matter experts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a revised list of milestones across multiple domains of development. Using expressive vocabulary, a key indicator of language development, as an illustrative example, the purpose of this brief review is to evaluate the evidence used to establish the CDC developmental milestones and determine whether the samples used to establish these milestones are representative of U.S. children. METHOD: Authors reviewed the methods and evidence cited to determine the CDC milestones. First, authors identified each language/communication milestone that measured expressive vocabulary as number of words, followed by review of the sources cited in support of each extracted milestone. Then, data related to both milestones and sample characteristics were extracted and compiled as well as compared with data from a validated parent report measure of expressive vocabulary, the MacArthur-Bates Communication Development Inventories. RESULTS: Results indicated that evidence was conflicting, misaligned, or missing for the selected CDC expressive vocabulary milestones. This review also indicated that the samples used to determine the selected CDC expressive vocabulary milestones are not representative of U.S. children. CONCLUSION: The striking paucity of evidence supporting the new CDC milestones for expressive vocabulary illustrates the critical need for future research in this area to establish more accurate milestones for U.S. children, with a focus on culturally inclusive large-scale data.

Hands on: Nonverbal communication in Native and non-Native American parent-child dyads during informal learning.

Parent-child communication is a rich, multimodal process. Substantial research has documented the communicative strategies in certain (predominantly White) United States families, yet we know little about these communicative strategies in Native American families. The current study addresses that gap by documenting the verbal and nonverbal behaviors used by parents and their 4-year-old children (N = 39, 25 boys) across two communities: Menominee families (low to middle income) living on tribal lands in rural Wisconsin, and non-Native, primarily White families (middle income) living in an urban area. Dyads participated in a free-play forest-diorama task designed to elicit talk and play about the natural world. Children from both communities incorporated actions and gestures freely in their talk, emphasizing the importance of considering nonverbal behaviors when evaluating what children know. In sharp contrast to the stereotype that Native American children talk very little, Menominee children talked more than their non-Native counterparts, underlining the importance of taking into account cultural context in child assessments. For children and parents across both communities, gestures were more likely than actions to be related to the content of speech and were more likely than actions to be produced simultaneously with speech. This tight coupling between speech and gesture replicates and extends prior research with predominantly White (and adult) samples. These findings not only broaden our theories of communicative interaction and development, but also provide new evidence about the role of nonverbal behaviors in informal learning contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).