BOEL screening: a program for the early detection of communicative disorders. Preliminary reports from a study on 1,000 Finnish infants.

Programs for infant screening of communicative disorders should cover the need for information about the development of attention functions--auditory, visual and tactile at an age when the child is on the doorstep of speech acquisition, i.e. before 1 year of age. BOEL is a new screening test, constructed to cheek the capacity of giving priority to signals for hearing, sight and motor attention in infants around 8 months of age. The child's innate program to follow an interesting signal, grasp it and investigate it with his mouth, turn his head after it, and smile responsively is tested with the help of two visual stimuli and four sound sources, ranging between 4 000 and 12 500 Hz. BOEL is meant to be used within the routine health check-ups of, for example, well-baby clinics.