TABLE 3.
Children’s Communication Checklist—Second Edition (CCC–2) subscales.
| Subscale | Theme of behaviors making up subscale items | Domain |
|---|---|---|
| A: Speech | Articulation and intelligibility | Structural |
| B: Syntax | Word order, grammatical markings | Structural |
| C: Semantics | Fluency with word recall, word-finding, and vocabulary access | Structural |
| D: Coherencea | Making sense in conversation through the proper referencing and sequencing of people and events | Structural |
| E: Inappropriate Initiation | Indiscriminate, talks too much, does not initiate topics about reciprocal interests, repetitive initiating | Pragmatics |
| F: Stereotyped Language | Overuse of “learned chunks” in conversations, prosody, being overly “precise” in communications | Pragmatics |
| G: Use of Context | Use and understanding of the social rules governing communication, including politeness, sarcasm, and humor; ability to correctly interpret others, including abstract language concepts | Pragmatics |
| H: Nonverbal Communication | Understanding and using nonverbal conversational cues including both gestures and facial expressions/affect | Pragmatics |
| I: Social Relations | Interest in and relations with peers | Autism/social |
| J: Interests | Restricted and/or repetitive interests, flexibility | Autism/social |
a
While the Coherence subscale was considered pragmatics in the CCC and contains questions about behaviors that many would consider pragmatic language behaviors (including discourse), validity analyses for the CCC–2 shifted this particular subscale into structural language as a result of its inability to differentiate children with SLI from children with more extreme pragmatic language difficulties and because some findings have argued that narrative ability is more closely related to core language abilities than to pragmatic language abilities (Norbury et al., 2004).