Early receptive and expressive vocabulary of Serbian speaking children

Abstract

The present study aims to explore the change of the vocabulary size and composition in the receptive and expressive language of Serbian speaking children between 8 and 30 months of age. It is a part of a broader project in relation to the adaptation of MacArthur-Bates’ Communicative Development Inventories for the Serbian language (CDIs; Fenson, Marchman, Thal, Dale, Reznick, & Bates, 2007). Two parental report inventories were applied: CDI-I for children 8-18 months, and CDI-II for children 16-30 months of age. The pilot study included 124 mothers from Belgrade (Serbia) and Banja Luka (Republic of Srpska, BiH) who filled in the inventories about their children's language and communicative status. The children’s gender was equally distributed in the sample. Over 70% of mothers had secondary high school education or lower, while the rest had a university degree. For the purpose of preliminary exploration of the vocabulary data obtained by the Serbian adaptation of CDIs scales, we: a) assessed the overall vocabulary growth, b) compared different lexical categories of words classified on the basis of communicational and/or morpho-syntactic functions - parts of speech like verbs and nouns, grammatical words (pronouns, prepositions), as well as early communicational expressions (pa-pa ‘bye-bye’); c. recorded the growth of different semantic categories of nouns relevant for the development of concepts (animals, toys, body parts, etc). The analysis revealed the trajectories of stable growth in children’s vocabulary size. The data show that development of receptive language in Serbian children is recorded early (already at 8 months) and is prevailing until the age of 18 months, while the expressive language starts around the first birthday. Nouns appear earlier than other categories of words and are followed by communicational expressions and verbs. Early comprehension of descriptive verbs and adverbials was recorded at 13-15 months, while their active usage was reported at 16-18 months of age. First grammatical words were reported at 16-18 months in the receptive language, and 22-24 in the expressive language. The receptive vocabulary size is much larger than expressive at 8-18 months, while the expressive vocabulary spurt is recorded at the end of the second year (22-24 months). In regards to noun semantics, the category of persons, sound effects/onomatopoeias, food/drink, and small household items appeared to be the earliest and most prominent in development. Our results support earlier findings on the role of nouns in early language development and extend these findings to the Serbian language. They also provide interesting insights into the roles that different classes of words and concepts have in children’s vocabularies at this early age. The presented findings were also in accordance with the previous insights on Serbian language development which provided preliminary empirical evidence for the validity of the Serbian CDI-I and CDI-II.