As more cochlear implants are fitted in pre-verbal children, early language checklists and scales have been used to determine whether language is developing normally. Although research tends to support the validity of checklists as screening tools in normal hearing populations, their sensitivity in detecting pre-verbal children with significant hearing loss who require specialist intensive language training remains to be demonstrated. So that language intervention can take place at the earliest possible time, it is important to determine whether scales and checklists used for infants are correlated with, or even predictive of later vocabulary and language development in toddlers and pre-schoolers