dc.description.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. | sr |