UK CDI

Category: What we’ve done so far

  • Why we started our UK-CDI research

    Here’s a fairly old video (and apologies for the sound at the end) but it sums up the point behind the UK-CDI research.

  • The UK-CDI so far – for parents and researchers

    The UK-CDI – the UK Communicative Development Inventory – is a questionnaire that parents fill in to tell us what words their child knows. We also ask parents of younger children to tell us if their baby (ages 8-18 months) recognises phrases, understands words and uses gestures like waving and pointing. Between 2011 and 2013 we collected over 1200 questionnaires from parents of these younger babies from across the UK.

    We published this information in a manual, available here. It contains information about how we developed the questionnaires, norms (these are like growth curves for language – we know where your child falls relative to other children their age) and the lists of words themselves. It is useful for health visitors, GPs, researchers, and speech and language therapists. Researchers and health care workers who buy a book can also use an online version of the questionnaire which is easier to get data from and for parents to fill in.

    Currently (Nov 2025) we are asking parents from all across the UK to fill in the Toddler version of the UK-CDI. If you want to take part, we ask that you live in the UK, and have a toddler aged 16 to 30 months. To take part please sign up here.

    If you are a researcher, who can advertise our CDI to parents who visit your lab or who are on your mailing list, please contact us on uk-cdi@lancaster.ac.uk

    Katie Alcock