The Danish Communicative Developmental Inventories: validity and main developmental trends

Abstract

This paper presents a large-scale cross-sectional study of Danish children's early language acquisition based on the Danish adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Measures of validity and reliability imply that the Danish adaptation of the American CDI has been adjusted linguistically and culturally in appropriate ways which makes it suitable for tapping into Danish children's language acquisition. The study includes 6,112 randomly selected children in the age of 0 ; 8 to 3 ; 0, and results related to the development of early gestures, comprehension and production of words as well as grammatical skills, are presented.

Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages: Is there a cross-linguistic order of words?

“…We compared our data to the available norms for MB-CDIs in nine languages: American English (Dale & Fenson, 1996), Croatian (Kuvac et al, 2009), Danish (Bleses et al, 2008), German (Szagun, Stumper, & Schramm, 2009), Italian (Camaioni, Caselli, Longobardi, & Volterra, 1991), Mexican Spanish (Dale & Fenson, 1996), Russian (Eliseeva & Vershinina, 2009), Swedish (Eriksson & Berglund, 1999), and Turkish (Aksu- Koç et al, 2009).…”

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

“…Moreover, in other parts of the CDI they answered three questions related to children's use of inflections, gave examples for the three longest sentences the child has produced and filled a check list on grammar. All items and categories are in close resemblance to the original CDI (cf Bleses et al 2008b). Ten parents did not answer the question 'Has your child started to combine words?…”

“…The American CDI has been adapted to Danish and a large population-based norming study in monolingual children between 8 and 36 months of age has been performed (Bleses, Vach, Wehberg, Faber, and Madsen, 2007;Bleses, Vach, Slott, Wehberg, Thomsen, Madsen, and Basbøll, 2008b), as well as a longitudinal study with 183 children (Wehberg, Vach, Bleses, Thomsen, Madsen, and Basbøll, 2007). The results of these studies formed the empirical knowledge base of the Center for Child Language at the University of Southern Denmark, which started in 2005 an initiative to develop screening and evaluation material for early language assessment in Danish children.…”

Er der kønsforskelle i hjernens bearbejdning af sprog?

“…Den mest anvendte test til måling af tidlig sprogtilegnelse er den såkaldte (Fenson et al 1994 Fundene synes imidlertid at vaere robuste og er blevet gentaget i forsøg med store grupper børn både på svensk (Berglund et al 2005) og dansk (Bleses et al 2008).…”