Crosslinguistic comparisons between Basque and Galician

PÉREZ PEREIRA, M.; ALMGREN, M; RESCHES, M.; EZEIZABARRENA, M; DÍAZ, C.; GARCÍA,I.

Dubrovnik

Encuentro; Proceedings from the First European Network meeting on the Communicative Development Inventories; 2006

Gävle University Press

Basque and Galician are two of the four official languages present in Spain. In this work comparisons between the results obtained through the application of the Basque and Galician versions of the CDI are presented. Both versions have a similar structure and a very close number of items in each of their sections. Data were collect from a large sample of 1077 and 1416 Galician and Basque children respectively. For the Form A, Words and Gestures (8-15 months), receptive and expressive vocabulary size is compared. For the Form B, Words and Sentences (16-30 months) lexical and syntactic aspects as well as their within-language relationships are compared. Large vocabulary and some minor grammatical differences favouring Galician children were found. These results are discussed in relation to the characteristics of this two minority languages and their contrasting sociolinguistic situation in their communities.