Rune Nørgaard Jørgensen

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.

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.

Construction of a Danish CDI Short Form for Language Screening at the Age of 36 Months: Methodological Considerations and Results.

Several research groups have previously constructed short forms of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) for different languages. We consider the specific aim of constructing such a short form to be used for language screening in a specific age group. We present a novel strategy for the construction, which is applicable if results from a population-based study using the CDI long form are available for this age group. The basic approach is to select items in a manner implying a left-skewed distribution of the summary score and hence a reliable discrimination among children in the lower end of the distribution despite the measurement error of the instrument. We report on the application of the strategy in constructing a Danish CDI short form and present some results illustrating the validity of the short form. Finally we discuss the choice of the most appropriate age for language screening based on a vocabulary score.