Dorthe Bleses

Early Vocabulary Development in Danish and other Languages: A CDI-Based Comparison.

The main objective of this paper is to describe the trajectory of Danish childrens early lexical development relative to other languages, by comparing a Danish study based on the Danish adaptation of The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) to 17 comparable CDI-studies. The second objective is to address the feasibility of cross-linguistic CDI-comparisons. The main finding is that the developmental trend of Danish childrens early lexical development is similar to trends observed in other languages, yet the vocabulary comprehension score in the Danish children is the lowest across studies from age 1 ; 0 onwards. We hypothesize that the delay is related to the nature of Danish sound structure, which presents Danish children with a harder task of segmentation. We conclude that CDI-studies are an important resource for cross-language studies, but reporting of studies needs to be standardized and the availability of published data improved in order to make comparisons more straightforward.

The Danish Communicative Developmental Inventories: validity and main developmental trends

This paper presents a large-scale cross-sectional study of Danish childrens early language acquisition based on the Danish adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Measures of validity and reliability imply that the Danish adaptation of the American CDI has been adjusted linguistically and culturally in appropriate ways which makes it suitable for tapping into Danish childrens language acquisition. The study includes 6,112 randomly selected children in the age of 0 ; 8 to 3 ; 0, and results related to the development of early gestures, comprehension and production of words as well as grammatical skills, are presented.

Declarative and procedural memory in Danish speaking children with specific language impairment.

UNLABELLED It has been proposed that the language problems in specific language impairment (SLI) arise from basal ganglia abnormalities that lead to impairments with procedural and working memory but not declarative memory. In SLI, this profile of memory functioning has been hypothesized to underlie grammatical impairment but leave lexical knowledge relatively unaffected. The current study examined memory and language functioning in 13 Danish-speaking children with SLI and 20 typically developing (TD) children. Participants were administered tasks assessing declarative, procedural and verbal working memory as well as knowledge of past tense and vocabulary. The SLI group performed significantly poorer than the TD group on the measure of verbal working memory. Non-significant differences between groups were observed on the measure of declarative memory, after controlling for verbal working memory. The groups were found to perform at comparable levels on the procedural memory task. On the language measures, the SLI group performed significantly poorer than the TD group on the past tense and vocabulary tasks. However, the magnitude of the difference was larger on the task assessing past tense. These results indicate grammatical knowledge is relatively more affected than lexical knowledge in Danish speaking children with SLI. However, the results were not consistent with the proposal linking impaired grammar to impairments with procedural memory. At the same time, the study does not rule out that other aspects of procedural learning and memory contribute to the language problems in SLI. LEARNING OUTCOMES The reader will be introduced to (1) different memory systems, in particular the declarative, procedural and working memory systems and (2) also research examining the relationship between these different memory systems and language in children with SLI.

Danish children's first words: Analysing longitudinal data based on monthly CDI parental reports

Using the Danish adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI), first language acquisition of 183 Danish children has been studied longitudinally on a monthly basis (8—30 months). Focussing on production, we study early lexical development from the very first word until roughly 100 words are produced, dividing this period into the stages of first-1, -10, -25, -50 and -100 words. We analyse Danish childrens first words with respect to semantic-pragmatic content, sound structure, and composition of the early lexicon based on formal linguistic categories. Comparing Danish results crosslinguistically reveals both the overall typicality of Danish childrens first words as well as striking differences for some single words.

CLEX: A cross-linguistic lexical norms database*

Parent report has proven a valid and cost-effective means of evaluating early child language. Norming datasets for these instruments, which provide the basis for standardized comparisons of individual children to a population, can also be used to derive norms for the acquisition of individual words in production and comprehension and also early gestures and symbolic actions. These lexical norms have a wide range of uses in basic research, assessment and intervention. In addition, cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development are greatly facilitated by the availability of norms from diverse languages. This report describes the development of CLEX, a new web-based cross-linguistic database for lexical data from adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. CLEX provides tools for a range of analyses within and across languages. It is designed to incorporate additional language datasets easily, and to permit users to define mappings between lexical items in pairs of languages for more specific cross-linguistic comparisons.

Gender differences in young children's speech: the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence

Many sociolinguistic studies have found that female speakers prefer standard speech forms while male speakers prefer vernacular forms. This article addresses two questions: (1) when does this split between male and female language occur in the language of young children; and (2) how do little boys and girls come to prefer linguistic features which are predominant in the language of adults? Two hypotheses accounting for the mechanisms of transmission are presented – the frequency hypothesis and the role-model hypothesis – and data from a study of Danish childrens acquisition of past-tense morphology is presented. The study found gender differences in the past-tense morphology of the 4-, 6- and 8-year-old participants, and it is argued that the role-model hypothesis would most adequately explain these differences. Furthermore, it is argued that early institutionalisation of children in Denmark may lead to increased peer group influence and help explain why gender differences occur at an earlier age compared to studies from the UK and the USA.

The Norwegian Communicative Development Inventories: reliability, main developmental trends and gender differences

This article presents results from a large population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories, comprising 6574 children between 8 and 36 months. Data were collected via the Internet. In accordance with similar studies from other languages, it was found that vocabulary comprehension preceded vocabulary production, and that both use of gestures, comprehension and production of vocabulary, and grammatical complexity increased with age. Moreover, boys lagged behind girls in vocabulary production and comprehension, in grammatical complexity, and in certain types of imitation – this gender difference seems to come out more clearly in this study’s data than in data from other languages.

Is Danish difficult to acquire? Evidence from Nordic past-tense studies

Cross-linguistic findings have shown that Danish childrens early receptive vocabulary development is slower relative to children learning other languages. In this study, we examined whether Danish childrens acquisition of inflectional past-tense morphology is delayed relative to Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish children. Our comparison of data from experimental studies of 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old childrens past-tense acquisition revealed that Danish children scored lowest across all measures of past tense. Analyses of the morphological and phonetic characteristics of these languages suggest that phonetic differences in strength and salience of cues relevant for the identification and segmentation of suffixes may account for cross-linguistic differences. The results support the hypothesis that the phonetic structure of Danish may delay these childrens language development relative to other languages.

Girls talk about dolls and boys about cars?: Analyses of group and individual variation in Danish children's first words

Based on data from the Danish Longitudinal CDI study on 182 Danish children, we analyse aspects of variation in the childrens first 100 words (produced). First, we demonstrate the effect of gender and birth order (number of siblings) on acquisition times of first words by identifying single words which are significantly earlier in the productive repertoire of, for instance, girls versus boys. We also investigate the effect of the same factors on the composition of the vocabulary where the definition of categories (word classes) is based on the CDIs thematic categorization. Finally, we investigate the individuality of the lexicons composition and find time-persistent differences between children for some word classes at this early stage.

The use of the Internet in collecting CDI data - an example from Norway

This article presents the methodology used in a population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories (CDI), comprising approximately 6500 children aged between 0.8 and 3.0. To our knowledge, this is the first CDI study collecting data via the Internet. After a short description of the procedures used in adapting the CDI to Norwegian and the selection of participants, we discuss the advantages and potential pitfalls of using web-based forms as a method of data collection. We found that use of web-based forms was far less time-consuming, and therefore also far less expensive than the traditional paper-based forms. The risk of coding errors was virtually eliminated with this method. We conclude that in a society with high access to the Internet, this is a method well worth pursuing.