| dc.description.abstract | The aim of this study was to validate the preliminary Serbian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI-I and CDI-II; Fenson et al., 2007). The preliminary Serbian adaptation was based on two sources of data. The first source was the Serbian Corpus of Early Child Language (the CHILDES database) which we used to select and modify the items according to the local language and cultural context. The second source was focus groups with experts and parents/caregivers organized in order to qualitatively evaluate the pre-preliminary versions of the inventories. The findings from the focus groups were used to improve the parents’ understanding of the general instructions and individual grammar-related items, thus ensuring more valid reports on morphological and syntactic properties of their child’s language. As a result of these analyses, the preliminary Serbian version contains a larger number of items than the original version, and some structural changes in the grammar sections.
The preliminary adapted version of the Serbian CDIs was used in the pilot study with a convenience sample of 123 mothers of children aged 8-18 months (N=62) and 16-30 months (N=61). The sample was equally distributed across different age groups (CDI-I: 8-9, 10-12, 13-15, 16-18 and CDI-II: 16-18, 19-21, 22-24, 25-27, 28-30) and gender (59 girls and 62 boys). The majority of mothers had secondary level education (high school) and the rest had higher level education or university. All the parents were from urban areas.
The results revealed that older children perform better on all CDI scales, which was also followed by expectedly increased variability. We observed a continuous increase in the mean performance levels on Actions and gestures CDI-I (F/3,54/=52.47, p<0.01), Early communicational gestures CDI-I (F/3,54/=32.61, p<0.01), Later communicational gestures CDI-I (F/3,54/=53.53, p<0.01), and Receptive lexicon CDI-I (F/3,54/=27.14, p<0.01). Additionally, the overall increase on Expressive lexicon CDI-I (F/3,54/=7.917, p<0.01) was accompanied by a significant spurt between the ages of 13-15 and 16-18. On CDI-II, we also found an overall significant increase in the mean performance levels on Expressive lexicon (F/4,51/=7.412, p=0.01), and Grammar (F/4,51/=9.99, p<0.01), again followed by a significant spurt, this time between the ages of 19-21 and 22-24. The expressive vocabulary and the usage of grammatical categories were slightly larger for girls compared to boys, although the differences were of small magnitude and not statistically significant. The analysis also provided additional information on the developmental trajectory across age in different semantic categories.
The results provided general evidence for the final adaptation of the Serbian version of CDI inventories, and indicated the parts where changes and improvements were necessary. This preliminary analysis confirmed the appropriateness of the CDI inventories for early language development assessment in Serbian language, while further work will be focused on item analysis. | sr |
