UPDATED SCORING! See the link below!
Approximately 30% of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are considered minimally verbal, but measuring their communicative capacity presents a challenge. Our team developed the Low Verbal Investigatory Survey (LVIS), a brief parent-report measure; it is short, easy to complete, and requires no equipment other than a pencil or an internet connection! The LVIS was designed to capture the kind of language and communication skills that are seen in autistic people with limited spoken capacity. Our research indicates that the LVIS is reliable and captures useful information, as it correlates with other non-autism-specific measures of communication.
To download the LVIS (version 5.0) and associated scoring guidelines, click here: LVIS_5.0.
The LVIS is described in two publications:
Eigsti, I. M., Tenenbaum, E., & Naples, A. (in press). Sensitivity and specificity of the Low Verbal Investigatory Survey in a large, diverse, American sample. Molecular Autism.
Naples, A., Tenenbaum, E. J., Jones, R. N., Righi, G., Sheinkopf, S. J., & Eigsti, I. M. (2023). Exploring communicative competence in autistic children who are minimally verbal: The Low Verbal Investigatory Survey for Autism (LVIS). Autism, 27(3), 1391–1406.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Meet the LVIS Project Team.
