The importance of early communicative skills for children’s later language and literacydevelopment has been widely acknowledged in research from the last 30 years or so. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development inventories (CDI) have enabled child language researchers todocument both individual variability and general trends in language development (e.g. Fenson et al.,1994). Contemporary work on children’s developmental profiles has highlighted the complexity ofthese early profiles, making it difficult to identify children in need of special support (Ukoumunne et al.,2012). This study investigates early communicative development, including individual growth models,in a sample of Swedish children based on parental report, using Swedish versions of the CDI (SECDI;Berglund & Eriksson, 2000; Eriksson & Berglund, 1999). Gender differences, as well as factorsinfluencing individual trajectories are considered.The study is a reanalysis of previously collected data (Cox Eriksson, 2014), using a subsampleof 128 children (61 girls and 67 boys) with complete records for measures collected at six-monthintervals (12, 18, 24 and 30 months of age). Variables include early communicative gestures, receptiveand productive vocabulary, vocabulary composition and grammatical development, assessed with acomposite grammar scale and a measure of syntactic complexity (M3L). A mixed linear model is usedto explore growth of productive vocabulary and grammar over time. Covariate effects, including genderand use of the pointing gesture at 12 months, are examined, as well as correlations among variables.Background factors for children with high and low vocabulary and grammar scores are inspected.Results indicate that a quadratic growth curve model provides the best fit for mean productivevocabulary development. Gender differences can be seen in vocabulary profiles, and although there isno main effect of gender, girls exhibit a significantly higher rate of growth. Individual vocabularytrajectories for boys exhibit more variation than those of girls. There is also a significant effect onvocabulary size for use of the pointing gesture at 12 months. Regarding grammatical development,trajectories for girls and boys exhibit differences in variation as well as individual outliers. Backgroundfactors for children with the lowest vocabulary scores at 30 months include low early gesture scores,being a laterborn, and having parents with a high school education only. Children with top M3L scoreshave high productive vocabulary scores with large numbers of nouns from 18 months on.Language variables are highly intercorrelated, confirming results from previous research usingSECDI. Mean scores for all children, or boys and girls, obscure the variation exhibited by individualtrajectories. Further, vocabulary composition differs with vocabulary size, a finding that also confirmsearlier CDI research. Use of the pointing gesture at 12 months may influence later vocabularydevelopment. However, as this study is based on parental report, complementary data may be neededfor a complete picture of communicative development.
2018.
15. Nordiske Symposium om Børnesprog, Syddansk Universitet, Odense 23-24 Maj 2018