Hans Basbøll

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.

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.

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.

Prosody, productivity and word structure: the stød pattern of Modern Danish

Parts of a new model of phonology-morphology-lexicon interplay is presented to account for the complex distribution of the Modern Danish stod (a syllabic prosody). Stod, which is sometimes productive for speakers, is analysed as a signal of the second mora of bimoraic syllables not subject to the Non-Stod Principle (NSP). The authors cross-language model for Systematically Graded Productivity of Endings (section 3) is shown to account for the application of NSP (section 4), and a detailed typology of lexemes with respect to stod-alternations, derived from the model, is presented in section 5. In section 6, a simple case of stod-alternations in inflection, viz. regular plurals of nouns, is given, and section 7 exemplifies stod and non-stod as a key to morphology for the addressee.

Phonology and lexicon in a cross-linguistic perspective: the importance of phonetics – a commentary on Stoel-Gammon's ‘Relationships between lexical and phonological development in young children’*

In her interesting article, Stoel-Gammon (this issue) reviews studies concerning the interactions between lexical and phonological development. While the focus of the review is on vocabulary production from children acquiring American English, she also suggests that cross-linguistic research be undertaken to examine how universal and language-specific properties affect the interaction between lexical and phonological acquisition. In this regard, Stoel-Gammon referred to the study of Bleses et al. ( 2008 ) who found differences in receptive vocabulary development across languages, based on norming studies for the Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson, Marchman, Thal, Dale, Reznick & Bates, 2007 ). Bleses et al . showed that Danish children were slower in the early comprehension of words (and phrases). It was hypothesized that the phonetic structure of Danish may account for the difference in receptive vocabulary skills in this population (Bleses & Basboll, 2004 ).

Danish Stød: Laryngealization or Tone

In the light of previous acoustic analyses of Danish stød and Danish intonation, we discuss two different phonological theories. In one, stød is an autonomous laryngeal syllable prosody. In the other, stød is the phonetic manifestation of an HL tonal pattern compressed within one syllable. The tonal representation is found to be contradicted by the phonetic reality, and it cannot account for the structurally determined alternation between non-stød and stød in inflection and derivation, nor for latent stød or stød in compounds. Furthermore, stød patterns are largely constant across regional varieties of Danish, but tonal patterns over the relevant structural domains are highly variable. Thus, stød may occur on any kind of tonal configuration, anywhere in the speakers pitch range, a variability which is hard to reconcile with a fixed HL representation.

The Danish Noun Plural Landscape

This article examines the Danish noun plural system in spoken language, i.e. we depart from a – radically new – sound perspective. We consider suffixes for which the categorization is not isomorphic with the orthographically determined categories. We give an overview of phonological stem changes, and we find interesting patterns of stød change in monosyllables. We identify 23 different combinations of suffixation and stem change, and give lexical frequencies for them. We consider two aspects of plural formation that are relevant for the investigation of first-language acquisition, that is, the gradation of stem change and the predictability of plural suffixes from gender and from stem-final phonology; we detect four classes of stem-final phonemes, i.e. segment types, which have different patterns of plural suffixation, and we point to some reasons why just these distinctions – mainly in sonority – can be relevant.

The impact of sound structure on morphology: An experimental study on children's acquisition of German and Danish noun plurals focusing on stem change

This study examines the impact of sound structure on childrens acquisition of noun plural morphology, focusing on stem change. For this purpose, a three-level classification of stem change properties according to sound structure is presented, with increasing opacity of the plural stem: no change, weak change, strong change. General hypotheses are presented as well as predictions following from them, both general and language-specific. The relevance of stem change is tested in 140 German-speaking and 140 Danish-speaking children from the age of three to nine years, by using a plural elicitation task. Results show that, in both languages, stem change has an impact on childrens correct production of plural stems. Language-specific differences between German and Danish, both in correct responses and in overgeneralization errors, are compared with our predictions and discussed in detail.