A crosslinguistic study of the relationship between grammar and lexical development

The relationship between grammatical and lexical development was compared in 233 English and 233 Italian children aged between 1;6 and 2;6, matched for age, gender, and vocabulary size on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Four different measures of Mean Length of Utterance w...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child language 2005-11, Vol.32 (4), p.759-786
Main Authors: DEVESCOVI, ANTONELLA, CASELLI, MARIA CRISTINA, MARCHIONE, DANIELA, PASQUALETTI, PATRIZIO, REILLY, JUDY, BATES, ELIZABETH
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Child Language
Child, Preschool
Children
Children & youth
Coding
Cognitive Psychology
Communication Disorders
Comparative Analysis
Comparative linguistics
Developmental psychology
English language
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Gender
Grammar
Humans
Infant
Italian language
Language
Language Acquisition
Language Research
Language Tests
Linguistics
Longitudinal Studies
MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory
Male
Mean Length of Utterance
Morphemes
Newborn. Infant
Parents
Parents & parenting
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Regression Analysis
Resistance (Psychology)
Socialization
Speech
Studies
Syntax
Toddlers
Vocabulary
Vocabulary Development
Vocabulary size
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Summary:The relationship between grammatical and lexical development was compared in 233 English and 233 Italian children aged between 1;6 and 2;6, 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 crosslinguistic 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.
ISSN:0305-0009
1469-7602
DOI:10.1017/S0305000905007105