Girls talk about dolls and boys about cars? Analyses of group and individual variation in Danish children's first words

Abstract

Based on data from the Danish Longitudinal CDI study on 182 Danish children, we analyse aspects of variation in the children's first 100 words (produced). First, we demonstrate the effect of gender and birth order (number of siblings) on acquisition times of first words by identifying single words which are significantly earlier in the productive repertoire of, for instance, girls versus boys. We also investigate the effect of the same factors on the composition of the vocabulary where the definition of categories (word classes) is based on the CDI's thematic categorization. Finally, we investigate the individuality of the lexicon's composition and find time-persistent differences between children for some word classes at this early stage.

The Danish Communicative Developmental Inventories: validity and main developmental trends

“…In a cross-linguistic study (Bleses et al, submitted), the trajectory of Danish children's early lexical development, as indexed by the CDI parental reports, relative to other languages, is described, by comparing the Danish study to all comparable CDI studies. For other studies based on the Danish CDI adaptation, see Lauritzen, Jørgensen, Olsen, Straarup & Michaelsen (2005) and Wehberg, Vach, Bleses, Thomsen, Madsen & Basbøll (2007, 2008.…”

Construction of a Danish CDI short form for language screening at the age of 36 months: Methodological considerations and results

“…Gender differences at the single word level have been previously demonstrated in Danish children with respect to the first 100 word based on the Danish longitudinal study (Wehberg, Vach, Bleses, Thomsen, Madsen, and Basbøll, 2008). Although we look on a later state of development, Wehberg and colleagues could also observe a preference of girls for 'fine' things related to dressing and of boys for noisy objects.…”

Children’s felicitous use of intersubjective particles evidences sensitivity to constellations of perspectives

“…Since Gender had only been included as a control variable, with no specific hypothesis about its effect, no strong conclusions can be drawn from this result. It should only be noted that the results are not overly surprising in light of the robust crosslinguistic finding that girls score significantly higher than boys (though slightly so) on general language development measures (Bornstein et al 2004), which has also been established for Danish children (Bleses et al 2008). If girls' advantage with discourse particles simply reflects such a general verbal advantage, the difference can be expected to be temporary and disappear during childhood (Wallentin 2009).…”

“…It is of course also possible that girls are socialized to communicate more about relationships (cf. Wehberg et al 2008), but this question is beyond the scope of the present study. Finally, the explanatory variable Number (reflecting production experience) emerged as a significant predictor of particle felicity, but it did so with a surprising negative main effect.…”