Parental report evidence for toddlers’ grammar and vocabulary in Bulgarian

Abstract

This is the first study of a large sample of Bulgarian-speaking toddlers and their communicative development. A Bulgarian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory Words and Sentences was used to obtain parent report data on 153 children between the ages of 20 and 30 months. Lexical and grammatical development were examined as a function of age, gender, and maternal education. While evidence was found for both lexical and grammatical developmental changes with age even in this age-restricted sample, gender had little effect on developmental levels, especially on the grammar components of the instrument. Maternal education was a significant predictor of children's developmental achievements and there was considerable individual variability. The development of lexical and grammatical knowledge was found to be correlated significantly.

The development of vocabulary and grammar: a longitudinal study of European Portuguese-speaking toddlers

“…Parental educational level, particularly the maternal educational level, is another highly explored environmental variable that is frequently used as an indicator of family socioeconomic status (SES). The research results regarding the existence of differences in vocabulary as a function of maternal education have been generally consistent: toddlers with more highly educated mothers have been shown to produce a higher number of words than toddlers with less educated mothers (Andonova, 2015;Cadime, Silva, Ribeiro, & Viana, 2018;Fenson et al, 2007;McGillion et al, 2017;Schults, Tulviste, & Konstabel, 2012). However, studies exploring the effects of parental education on vocabulary growth curves are scarce, and their findings are inconsistent: several studies found that children with mothers with higher educational levels not only have a larger lexicon but also demonstrate faster growth in the number of words that they are able to produce (Pan, Rowe, Singer, & Snow, 2005;Rowe, Raudenbusch, & Goldin-Meadow, 2012).…”

“…Additionally, the findings regarding gender differences in grammar abilities are inconsistent. Some studies have found gender differences favoring girls in sentence complexity (Bleses et al, 2008;Simonsen et al, 2014), or both the MLU and sentence complexity (Fenson et al, 2007;Jackson-Maldonado et al, 2003;Pérez-Pereira & Soto, 2003), while other studies have found no gender differences in either of these grammar dimensions (Andonova, 2015).…”

“…The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI): Words and Sentences (Fenson et al, 2007) is among the most commonly used instruments to assess language in toddlers, and includes a subscale to assess the complexity of the sentences produced by toddlers between the ages of 1;4 and 2;6. Although this subscale has been included in several CDI adaptations for other languages (e.g., Andonova, 2015;Bleses et al, 2008;Jackson-Maldonado et al, 2003;Mariscal et al, 2007;Pérez-Pereira & Soto, 2003), the subscales included in the different CDI adaptations differ substantially, and to the best of our knowledge, no longitudinal studies investigating the growth curves of sentence complexity in toddlers aged up to age 2;6 have been performed.…”

Early lexical development: Do day care attendance and maternal education matter?

“…Some studies using parental reports of children’s communicative abilities found evidence that a higher level of maternal education is associated with a higher number of words produced by the children (e.g. Andonova, 2015; Fenson et al, 2007; Jackson-Maldonado et al, 2003), but others found no differences in vocabulary production as a function of maternal education (e.g. Stolt et al, 2007).…”

The power of imageability: How the acquisition of inflected forms is facilitated in highly imageable verbs and nouns in Czech children

“…Even though the largest section of the CDI is concerned with the development of vocabulary knowledge, the toddler versions of the tool (such as the original CDI: Words and Sentences) contain one or more sections examining grammatical development. The grammatical sections of CDI have been used to argue for specific hypotheses about the relation between vocabulary and grammar development (Andonova, 2015; Caselli, Casadio, & Bates, 1999). Parent report measures of grammatical skills were used, for example, to examine the relations between grammatical development and social understanding (Markova & Smolík, 2014) or to assess the grammatical markers of language impairment (Hadley, 2006).…”