Quantitative indications of change in early Serbian language production

Abstract

The study is an exploration of quantitative indicators of the growth of spontaneous language production of eight children longitudinally recorded at 16 age levels from 18-48 months of age. The interaction sequences were transcribed and compiled in the Serbian Corpus of Early Child Langauge. The study is focused on the usage of words and utterances, vocabulary size, lexical diversity, and the length of utterance. The aim was to retrieve information on the average performance of children and variation on each measure and to compare them across ages. The findings revealed significant increase across age on all quantitative indications. Differences among children are explored and a preliminary estimation of the levels of language productivity and growth was made. The individual profiles are compared, so advanced and slower children are identified in the corpus.