Latvian CDI: methodology, developmental trends, and cross-linguistic comparison

ABSTRACT

In this article, we report the results of a large-scale population study based on the Latvian adaptation of Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) – a parental report tool aimed at mapping the lexical and grammatical development of children under the age of three. Two CDI forms are discussed: CDI I: ‘Words and Gestures’ (8–16 months), and CDI II: ‘Words and Sentences’ (17–36 months). This article discusses the Internet-based methodology used for the data collection, reports the main developmental trends of the lexical development of Latvian children, and compares these trends to analogous data from American English, Norwegian, and Russian.

KEYWORDS:

• CDI
• Latvian
• lexical development
• receptive and productive vocabulary
• communicative gestures
• cross-linguistic comparison

Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received funding from the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2009–2014 under Project Contract No NFI/R/2014/053. We also gratefully acknowledge the funding from the Research Council of Norway (Centers of Excellence funding scheme, project no. 223265).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As noted by one reviewer, the lack of correlation between maternal education and child performance on Latvian CDI is likely due to the fact that the normative sample is highly skewed in the direction of higher parental education.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway (Centres of Excellence funding) [223265];Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2009-2014 [Project Contract n° NFI/R/2014/053].

Notes on contributors

Olga Urek

Olga Urek holds a doctoral degree in linguistics and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her main research interests include monolingual and bilingual language acquisition, theoretical and experimental phonology and Baltic languages.

Anna Vulāne

Anna Vulāne is a professor at the University of Latvia since 1999. From 2009 to 2016 she was a Head of Child Language Research Centre at Riga Teacher Training and Educational Management Academy. Her research interests include child language development, Latvian derivational and morphological system and Latgalian written language.

Roberts Darģis

Roberts Darģis is a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Computing, University of Latvia and a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia. His main research direction is natural language processing, especially speech processing. He has been involved in speech corpora development for Latvian.

Agrita Tauriņa

Agrita Tauriņa is an associate professor at the University of Latvia (Faculty of Education, Psychology and Art). Her research interests include pre-school pedagogy, school management, pre-school teachers’ cooperation with the family and speech therapists in the evaluation of a child’s speech and physical development.

Tija Zīriņa

Tija Zīriņa holds a doctoral degree in psychology and is a professor at the University of Latvia (Faculty of Education, Psychology and Art, Department of Pre-school and Primary School Education). Her current research interests include child language development in early childhood and pre-school age. T. Zīriņa is training prospective pre-school and primary school teachers since 1995.

Hanne Gram Simonsen

Hanne Gram Simonsen is a professor (emerita) of linguistics at the University of Oslo. Her main fields of research include language acquisition (in particular the acquisition of phonology, morphology, and lexicon in a cross-linguistic and multilingual perspective), clinical linguistics (in particular language disorders in children and in adults with aphasia and Alzheimer’s disease) and instrumental phonetics.