Infant communicative development assessed with the European Portuguese MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories short forms

Abstract

This article describes the European Portuguese MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories short forms, the first published instruments for the assessment of language development in EP-learning infants and toddlers. Normative data from the EP population are presented, focusing on developmental trends for vocabulary learning, production of morphologically complex words and word combinations. Significant effects of gender were found for early word comprehension and production, as well as for toddlers' word production, word complexity and word combinations, with a consistent advantage for girls. By contrast, effects of socioeconomic status were limited to early word comprehension. A cross-language comparison with short form data for other languages was performed. Differences across languages only emerged for toddlers. However, effects of gender were found independently of language differences.

Eyes or mouth? Exploring eye gaze patterns and their relation with early stress perception in European Portuguese

“…Typical development was assessed after the experimental task, within a follow-up procedure that was part of the EBELa Project (http://labfon.letras.ulisboa.pt/babylab/ EBELa/). Two screening tools were used: (i) the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales Developmental Profile (CSBS-DP) Checklist (Wetherby & Prizant, 2003) adapted for EP (Frota, Vicente, Filipe, & Vigário, 2014-2016, and filled in by all caregivers when infants were between 6 and 24 months of age; and (ii) The Portuguese MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) short forms (Frota, Butler, Correia, Severino, Vicente, & Vigário, 2016), filled in by caregivers when infants were between 8 and 30 months. According to these developmental tools, all children exhibited social communication, language and symbolic functioning skills as expected for their age (including eye gaze, gestures, productive and receptive vocabularies).…”

Basic research in phonology, resources and applications–the case of frequency

“…This child directed speech resource is part of the supporting documents for the development of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Inventories (CDI) for European Portuguese -Short forms (Frota 2012a, b;Frota, Butler, Correia, Severino, Vicente & Vigário 2016). The main goal behind CDS_EP was to provide information on the child input relevant to the developmental course of lexical acquisition.…”

“…This child speech resource was built as part of the supporting documents for the development of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Inventories (CDI) for European Portuguese -Short forms for Level I (8 to 18 months) and Level 2 (16 to 30 months) Frota et al 2016). PLEX5 may be a source of information on the developmental course of lexical acquisition.…”

“…FrePOP CDS lexicon and PLEX5 were also intensively used in the recent adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Inventories (CDI) for European Portuguese -Short Form I and Short Form II in the process of selecting the words to appear in the forms (Frota et al 2016). Word frequency patterns in PLEX5 and CDS were instrumental to ensure that the lexical items included show varying ages of acquisition (early as well as late-appearing words) and varying frequency profiles (high, mid and low frequency words), and that individual, regional and other kinds of biases for different age ranges were avoided.…”

Investigating Vocabulary Abilities in Bilingual Portuguese-English-Speaking Children

“…The study also employed adaptations of the CDIs that were not bilingual in form, but that were comprised of diverse language pairs: Polish-English, German-English, Hebrew-English, and French-Portuguese -using a different version of the CDI for European Portuguese (Frota, Butler, Correia, Severino, Vicente & Vigário, 2015).…”