A broadened estimate of syntactic and lexical ability from the MB-CDI

A critical question in the study of language development is to understand lexical and syntactic acquisition, which play different roles in speech to the extent it would be natural to surmise they are acquired differently. As measured through the comprehension and production of closed-class words, sy...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child language 2022-05, Vol.49 (3), p.615-632
Main Authors: DAY, Trevor K.M., ELISON, Jed T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Age Differences
Birth order
Brief Research Report
Caregivers
Child Language
Children & youth
Classification
Comprehension
Computational Linguistics
Content words
Education
English
Ethnicity
Factor Analysis
Function words
Gestures
Grammar
Humans
Language
Language acquisition
Language Aptitude
Language Development
Language Development Disorders
Language Skills
Language Tests
Measures (Individuals)
Morphemes
Morphology
Mothers
Multilingualism
Native language acquisition
Nonverbal Communication
North American English
Nouns
Parsing
Phonetics
Phonology
Semantics
Sentences
Speech Communication
Syntax
Variables
Verbs
Vocabulary
Vocabulary Development
Word Recognition
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:A critical question in the study of language development is to understand lexical and syntactic acquisition, which play different roles in speech to the extent it would be natural to surmise they are acquired differently. As measured through the comprehension and production of closed-class words, syntactic ability emerges at roughly the 400-word mark. However, a significant proportion of the developmental work uses a coarse combination of function and content words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI). Using the MB-CDI Wordbank database, we implemented a factor analytic approach to distinguish between lexical and syntactic development from the Words and Sentences (WS) form that involves both function words and the explicit categorizations. Although the Words and Gestures (WG) form did not share the factor structure, common WG/WS elements recapitulate the expected age-related changes. This parsing of the MB-CDI may prove simple, yet fruitful in subsequent investigation.
ISSN:0305-0009
1469-7602
DOI:10.1017/S0305000921000283