Functional communication skills of children with speech difficulties: Performance on Bishop’s Children’s Communication Checklist

This paper examines the functional communication skills of a group of children with speech difficulties. Using the Children’s Communication Checklist (CCC) (Bishop, 1998), the effects of a significant speech difficulty on wider social communication were measured and compared to a control group. It was found that teachers and speech and language therapists rated children with speech difficulties less highly than controls on a range of communication skills. In addition to expected perceived differences between the groups on speech and syntax subscales, children with speech difficulties were rated significantly less highly on aspects of their social communication, including the subscales of communicative coherence and use of conversational context.