Comparing early communicative skills in two varieties of South American Spanish using the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI)

JUNYENT, ANDREA A. ; RESCHES, MARIELA

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Congreso; 7th Summer Neurolinguistics School; 2020

Center for Language and Brain-National Research University

With the aim to contribute to the understanding of lexical and syntactical growth that takes place before the second year, and the vocabulary spurt (a period of rapid word learning) that characterises this stage of development, we compared language abilities of children speaking Peruvian and Argentinian varieties of Spanish. Vocabulary size, strongly related to syntactic complexity, has been widely used for predicting both lexical and grammatical development (Caselli et al., 1999; Dale & Goodman, 2005; Fenson et al., 1994; Jackson-Maldonado et al., 2003; Marchman & Bates, 1994; Pérez Pereira & Resches, 2011). Furthermore, information on lexical growth trajectories at a young age has been shown to be useful for predicting later vocabulary skills and school readiness (Row & al., 2012).We compared lexical and syntactic abilities of Peruvian speakers to Argentinian speakers between 16 and 30 months of age, employing two measures of specific versions of the parental reports CDI: Words and Sentences (Fenson et al., 2007) for each variety. The Peruvian children are a subgroup of 129 children whose language was assessed employing two pilot versions of the Peruvian CDI. From this group, 91 children were selected based on parental consent to extra studies. They were matched with a subsample from the standardisation sample of the Argentinian CDI (N= 703). Every Peruvian child was matched by age, gender and mother?s schooling to an Argentinian child obtaining a group of 182 children. In addition, a systematic sampling procedure was applied in order to assure representativity.We compared the scores of each group (Argentinian and Peruvian) in Vocabulary ? a checklist of more than 600 items ?, and MLU-3 ? the mean length, in words, of the child´s three longest utterances reported by parents ?, taking into account age, gender, and attendance to a day care centre. Argentinian children show wider Vocabulary (X̄ = 213.97, S.D. = 168.96, N = 91) and higher MLU-3 (X̄ = 2.85, S.D. = 2.05, N = 91) than Peruvian (X̄ = 156.59, S.D. = 152.313, N = 91; X̄ = 2.27, S.D. = 1.47, N = 90; F(1,180) = 5.79, p = 0.02; F(1,179) = 4.79, p = 0.03). Moreover, we find a statistically significant interaction between the effects of group and attendance to a day care centre on Vocabulary (F (1, 166) = 3.97, p = 0.048). In order to go in depth on these results and examine the growth trajectory of these abilities, we subdivided each group by age in months: 16 to 20, 21 to 25, and 26 to 30. Preliminary results show that while the Argentinian sample shows a vocabulary growth pattern consistent with a lexical spurt between 21 and 25 months, Peruvian children present a slower, more gradual although significant lexical growth. However, a vocabulary spurt seems to emerge in this last group after 26 months. Further analysis will be conducted on age of acquisition of each item, comparing identical, equivalent and exclusive items for each version of the CDI, in order to identify the locus of the differences.