Developing a parent vocabulary checklist for young Indigenous children growing up multilingual in the Katherine region of Australia’s Northern Territory

Developing the Little Kids’ Word List app, a fair assessment tool of communicative development for young Aboriginal children in multilingual families in Central Australia

“…The MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) is a widely-used international tool for assessment of young children's vocabulary development, up to 36 months of age. There are locally-developed CDIs for about 90 languages worldwide, but until now there was only one for an Australian Indigenous language, Kriol (Jones et al, 2020). A CDI, which is authorised by the MacArthur Bates CDI Advisory Board (Fenson et al, 2000), is a list of the most common words that young children up to approximately three years of age are likely to know and say in their home language(s).…”

“…If this were found to be the case, then a CDI developed for speakers of one Aboriginal language might be a useful beginning point for an adaptation for another Aboriginal language. To explore this possibility, we compare the similarities of the concepts and vocabulary items in the languages in the Little Kids' Word Listdescribed in this paper and developed for four languages in Central Australia -with the CDIs for two other languages spoken in Australia, one the Aboriginal language Kriol, called ERLI (Jones et al, 2020) and the other, Australian English as spoken in Sydney, called OZI-SF (Jones et al, 2022) The third challenge is that an assessment tool needs to be accessible to its potential users, so the format of the tool is an important consideration. In the Central Australian context Aboriginal adults often do not have opportunities to engage frequently with reading and writing in all of the languages they speak.…”

“…This raises the question of whether speakers of other languages beyond Central Australia, with historically shared sociocultural practices, are likely to express similar concepts when interacting with young children. There are two other CDIs developed for Australian populations: one for Indigenous children speaking Kriol (and potentially other languages) in the north of the Northern Territory, called ERLI (Jones, et al, 2020); and the other for mainstream Australian English-speaking children in Sydney, NSW (Jones, et al, 2022, Kalashnikova, 2016. To investigate the question of shared concepts within locally-developed CDIs, we compare the concepts expressed in the three Australian…”

“…CDIs, the Little Kids' Word List, ERLI (Jones et al, 2020) and OZI-SF (Jones et al, 2022;Kalashnikova et al, 2016).…”

“…)), compared in this study, contains a written list of 100 words and allows caregivers to indicate children's speech production only, not comprehension. The other CDI, the Early Language Inventory (ERLI,Jones et al, 2020) was created for speakers of Kriol, an English-lexified creole language that has emerged since the early 1900s. It is a language distinct from English, with its own lexicon, structure and phonology, even though many words might be recognisable as being derived from English.…”