Correlations between Gesell scores in infancy and performance on verbal and non-verbal tests in early childhood.

Since infant developmental tests are heavily loaded with perceptual-motor items and are relatively free of auditory-verbal items, it was hypothesized that performance on infant tests would correlate higher with those later tests which measure non-verbal skills and lower with those tests that measure mostly verbal skills. The Gesell performance of 26 normal, male white infants at 7, 9 and 15 mo. correlated significantly and consistently with performance on the Merrill-Palmer Scale at 27 mo. and the visual-motor channel of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities at 5 yr. and showed consistently non-significant correlations with the Stanford Binet at 3 yr., the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test at 5 yr., and the auditory-vocal channel of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities at 5 yr.