The Early Communication Indicator (ECI)

The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is one means of checking children’s growth toward the important outcome of being able to express themselves through their gestures, vocalizations, words, and sentences.

You can read more about IGDIs by reviewing our list of publications. To buy toys for administering the ECI, see our toys needed page. You can also find tips for IGDI administration including administering IGDIs remotely on our site.

ECI Key Skills

The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) for children birth to age 3 is a sensitive, easy to administer measure of communication (e.g., Luze et al., 2001). The ECI is a brief, repeatable, play-based, observational measure of a child’s communicative performance during a 6-minute play period with a familiar adult. The play session is standardized around one of two toys – either the Fisher-Price House or Fisher-Price Barn.

• Four communicative behaviors, or Key Skill Elements selected and validated through research, make up the ECI’s total communication indicator: Gestures, Vocalizations, Single Words, and Multiple Words
• These skills were selected to represent the prelinguistic domain (Gestures and Vocalizations) and the spoken or signed language domain (Single and Multiple Words)
• The Total Weighted Communication score is derived by summing these four skills and giving additional ‘weight’ to each single word (x2) and multiple word (x3).
• The following key skill elements were not included because they did not add to the sensitivity of the ECI: Coordinated Attention, because of its low frequency of occurrence and difficulty obtaining inter-observer agreement, and Social Attention or eye contact, because it did not show growth over time.

Early Communication Indicator – Autism (ECI-A)

The Early Communication Indicator–Autism (ECI-A) is an adaptation of the Early Communication Indicator designed specifically for use with young autistic children. While maintaining the ECI’s play-based, observational approach to measuring expressive communication, the ECI-A extends the age range for use with children up to 60 months and increases the administration time to approximately 10 minutes.

In addition to the standard ECI’s focus on gestures, vocalizations, single- and multiple words, the ECI-A incorporates planned “distraction tasks” within the play session to create opportunities for children to demonstrate key social communication skills. These include the child’s initiation of joint attention and the quality of directed communication.

Because of these additional components and scoring procedures, the ECI-A requires more extensive preparation, including a two-day training for reliable administration and scoring. The 2-day training includes training on both the standard ECI and additional components of the ECI-A. The ECI-A’s enhancements provide a more comprehensive and sensitive measure of communication growth for autistic children while preserving its efficiency and ability to be administered frequently to measure response to intervention.