Abstract
A critical question in the study of language development is to understand lexical and syntactic acquisition, which play different roles in speech to the extent it would be natural to surmise they are acquired differently. As measured through the comprehension and production of closed-class words, syntactic ability emerges at roughly the 400-word mark. However, a significant proportion of the developmental work uses a coarse combination of function and content words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI). Using the MB-CDI Wordbank database, we implemented a factor analytic approach to distinguish between lexical and syntactic development from the Words and Sentences (WS) form that involves both function words and the explicit categorizations. Although the Words and Gestures (WG) form did not share the factor structure, common WG/WS elements recapitulate the expected age-related changes. This parsing of the MB-CDI may prove simple, yet fruitful in subsequent investigation.
Highlights
Language acquisition is characterized by a cascading and overlapping series of changes across different domains
The two- and three-factor solutions had similar fit statistics, and based on their structure and parsimony, we propose that the two-factor solution is the most informative
The most important finding in this paper is that the categories nominally included in the lexical inventory on Words and Sentences (WS), together with the later morphological and syntactic items represent growth on an underlying factor, here termed “structural”, representing both developing knowledge of sentential structure and inflectional morphology
Summary
Language acquisition is characterized by a cascading and overlapping series of changes across different domains. Acquisition begins before birth, as phonetic perception begins in the womb (Moon, Lagercrantz & Kuhl, 2013). During the first year of life, phonetic perception begins to narrow (Kuhl, Conboy, Padden, Nelson & Pruitt, 2005; Kuhl, Stevens, Hayashi, Deguchi, Kiritani & Iverson, 2006), this period is longer in learners of multiple languages (Kuhl, Tsao & Liu, 2003). Is a rapid explosion in lexical inventory, from approximately 10 words at 12 months to nearly 600 by 30 months (Dromi, 1987). At approximately 18 months, children begin combining these words into sentences that grow steadily more complex (Fenson, Marchman, Thal, Dale, Reznik & Bates, 2007), which requires the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 3.83.153.241, on 02 Nov 2021 at 13:53:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
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