The Macarthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories as a Diagnostic Tool for the Lexicon of Bilingual Children

Abstract

The article analyzes the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) as a means of research and diagnostics of children's speech in different languages. It takes into account the data from Stanford University websites, which deal with findings resulted from the analysis of completed questionnaires. The sites provide abundant information concerning adaptations of this tool for more than 100 languages and a database of children's passive and active lexicons for 29 languages (including Russian). Moreover, on the basis of 23 languages, they show unique and universal character of word usage in the speech of young learners studying several different languages simultaneously. This article also provides research findings on the bilingual children’s early vocabulary (with Russian as the Heritage language) under the RFBR grant No. 19-012-00293.

Cross-Cultural Sex/Gender Differences in Produced Word Content Before the Age of 3 Years

“…Data from the MB-CDI:WS are available from more than 41,000 children at Wordbank (http://wordbank .stanford.edu/) and are accessible through the R package wordbankr (Braginsky et al, 2020). This database (Frank et al, 2017) includes samples from 26 languages: Cantonese (Tardif et al, 2009), Croatian (Kovacevic et al, 1996), Czech (Markova & Smolík, 2013), Danish (Bleses et al, 2008), English (American; Fenson et al, 2007;Thal et al, 2013), English (Australian; Kalashnikova et al, 2016), French (French;Von Holzen et al, 2018), French (Quebecois;Trudeau & Sutton, 2011), German (Szagun et al, 2009), Greek (Cypriot;Taxitari et al, 2015), Hebrew (Hila Gendler Shalev, Tel Aviv University), Italian (Caselli et al, 1995), Kigiriama (Alcock et al, 2015), Kiswhahili (Alcock et al, 2015), Korean (Pae & Kwak, 2011), Latvian (Urek et al, 2019), Mandarin (Beijing;Liu & Chen, 2015;Tardif et al, 2009), Mandarin (Taiwanese; Liu & Chen, 2015), Norwegian (Simonsen et al, 2013), Portuguese (European; Irene Cadime, University of Minho); Russian (Eliseeva & Vershinina, 2009), Slovak (Svetlana Kapalková, Comenius University), Spanish (European; López Ornat et al, 2005), Spanish (Mexican; Jackson-Maldonado et al, 2003), Swedish (Eriksson & Berglund, 2002), and Turkish (Acarlar et al, 2009).…”

The Acquisition of Russian Word-Initial Consonant Clusters in a Russian-American English Bilingual Child: An Overview of One Child’s Exceptional Production

“…The current database of the Ulijana corpus contains: (a) weekly day-long recordings (about 450 hours of naturalistic speech data, in total) collected by means of LENA TM (The Language ENvironment Analysis System; Richards et al, 2008); 7 (b) 18 one-hour long transcribed samples of parent-child interactions with 3 to 7 days interval for the first 8 hours and the remaining 10 one month apart; (c) the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories for Russian (CDI-Rus; Eliseeva et al, 2017) filled out by Ulijana's mother twice, first, when Ulijana was 23 months old, and the second time when she turned 3.…”