A crosslinguistic study of the relationship between grammar and lexical development (original) (raw)
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The relationship between grammatical and lexical development was compared in 233 English and 233 Italian children between 18 and 30 months of age, matched for age, gender, and vocabulary size on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Four different measures of Mean Length of Utterance were applied to the three longest utterances reported by parents, and to corrected/expanded versions representing the 'target' for each utterance. Italians had longer MLUs on most measures, but the ratio of actual to target MLUs did not differ between languages. Age and vocabulary both contributed significant variance to MLU, but the contribution of vocabulary was much larger, suggesting that vocabulary size may provide a better basis for cross-linguistic comparisons of grammatical development. The relationship between MLU and vocabulary size was non-linear in English but linear in Italian, suggesting that grammar 'gets off the ground' earlier in a richly inflected language. A possible mechanism to account for this difference is discussed.
A comparison of the transition from first words to grammar in English and Italian
Journal of Child Language, 1999
Cross-linguistic similarities and differences in early lexical and grammatical development are reported for English-speaking children and Italian-speaking children between ; and ; . Parents completed the English or Italian versions of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory : Words and Sentences, a parent report instrument that provides information about vocabulary size, vocabulary composition and grammatical complexity across this age range. The onset and subsequent growth of nouns, predicates, function words and social terms proved to be quite similar in both languages. No support was found for the prediction that verbs would emerge earlier in Italian, although Italians did produce a higher proportion of social terms, and there were small but intriguing differences in the shape of the growth curve for grammatical function words. A strikingly similar nonlinear relationship between grammatical complexity and vocabulary size was observed in both languages, and examination of the order in which function words are acquired also yielded more similarities than differences. However, a comparison of the longest sentences reported for a subset of children demonstrates large cross-linguistic differences in the
Early relations between lexical and grammatical development in very immature Italian preterms
Journal of Child Language, 2006
This study aimed to investigate early lexical and grammatical development and their relations in a sample of very immature healthy preterms, in order to assess whether their linguistic development [*] Perrone for their help with the medical examination; the children and parents for their participation in the research. We would also like to thank Maria Cristina Caselli and Antonella Devescovi for their precious suggestions concerning the questionnaire and the test used in the research and Roberto Bolzani for statistical advice. Thanks also to the reviewers for their perceptive comments. Finally, we are grateful to Annette Karmiloff-Smith for her careful comments and helpful suggestions.
2001
In this study vocabulary development of a sample of Italian children was evaluated through monthly administration of the Italian version of the CDI. Data collection started at ; - ; for children and at ; - ; for the remaining subjects and continued until children's vocabulary reached words. At fixed stages of vocabulary size (, and words), individual differences in percentile scores and vocabulary composition were examined. Individual growth curves were analysed in order to verify the presence of a vocabulary spurt and the type of lexical items which contributed most to rapid acceleration in vocabulary growth.
First Language, 2017
The results from a large-scale study on toddlers’ language acquisition in European Portuguese are presented. Toddlers’ lexical and grammatical competencies were assessed using the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. The results, based on 3012 reports completed by parents, indicate an increase in the lexical size and on five measures of grammatical development (production of regular morphology, irregular morphology, over-regularizations, mean length of utterances and sentence complexity) across age groups. A main effect of gender was found for lexical size, production of regular and irregular morphology, production of over-regularizations and sentence complexity, with girls obtaining overall higher scores than boys. All lexical and grammatical development measures are positively correlated, even after controlling for age and gender effects. These findings are discussed in terms of their consistency with those obtained for other languages.
Nouns and verbs in the vocabulary acquisition of Italian children
Journal of Child Language, 2007
The vocabulary development of 24 Italian children aged between 16 and 18 months at the beginning of the study has been longitudinally monitored on a monthly basis using the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory drawn up by their mothers.
The language-specific nature of grammatical development: evidence from bilingual language learners
Developmental Science, 2004
The fact that early lexical and grammatical acquisition are strongly correlated has been cited as evidence against the view that the language faculty is composed of dissociable and autonomous modules . However, previous studies have not yet eliminated the possibility that lexical-grammar associations may be attributable to language-general individual differences (e.g. children who are good at learning words are good at learning grammar). Parent report assessments of toddlers who are simultaneously learning English and Spanish ( n = 113) allow an examination of the specificity of lexical-grammar relationships while holding child factors constant. Within-language vocabulary-grammar associations were stronger than cross-language relationships, even after controlling for age, proportion of language exposure, general language skill and reporter bias. Similar patterns were found based on naturalistic language samples ( n = 22), ruling out a methodological artifact. These results are consistent with the view that grammar learning is specifically tied to lexical progress in a given language and provide further support for strong lexical -grammatical continuity early in acquisition.
Behavior Research Methods, 2004
The CFVlexvar.xls database includes imageability, frequency, and grammatical properties of the first words acquired by Italian children. For each of 519 words that are known by children 18–30 months of age (taken from Caselli & Casadio’s, 1995, Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory), new values of imageability are provided and values for age of acquisition, child written frequency, and adult written and spoken frequency are included. In this article, correlations among the variables are discussed and the words are grouped into grammatical categories. The results show that words acquired early have imageable referents, are frequently used in the texts read and written by elementary school children, and are frequent in adult written and spoken language. Nouns are acquired earlier and are more imageable than both verbs and adjectives. The composition in grammatical categories of the child’s first vocabulary reflects the composition of adult vocabulary. The full set of these norms can be downloaded fromwww.psychonomic.org/archive/.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
This study presents the validation analysis of the European Portuguese version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory III (CDI-III-PT). The CDI-III-PT is a parental report measure allowing researchers to assess expressive vocabulary and the syntactic abilities of children aged 2;6–4;0. In this study, we present a version comprising a lexical subscale which follows the Swedish adaptation and an original syntactic subscale allowing us to include language-specific structures. The reports of 739 children were collected; in addition, a standardized measure of language was also administered to a sub-sample of these children and the reports of preschool teachers were collected for another sub-sample. The results indicate a high internal consistency of the lexical and syntactic subscales. As for sociodemographic variables often found to be predictors of language development, as measured by this type of instrument, the results indicate that age and maternal education are ...