Abstract
Here, we studied the beginnings of language development, jointly assessing two groups of precursors, sociodemographic and pre-linguistic, that have previously been studied separately. Thus, the general objective of this study was to explore which factors best explained the acquisition of initial expressive vocabulary. The sample consisted of 504 participants from Catalan-speaking homes with ages ranging between 10 and 18 months. The data were obtained through the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MCB-CDIs). Vocabulary development shows a lexical spurt at 17 months. Regression analyses show that pre-linguistic factors have more explanatory power of than sociodemographic ones. Within the sociodemographic variables, age, birth order and birth weight explain part of the vocabulary variance. With respect to pre-linguistic variables, imitation, late gestures and phrase comprehension are predictors of the initial vocabulary acquisition. Specifically, imitation and late gestures were the pre-linguistic behaviours that made it possible to distinguish between children with higher and lower levels of vocabulary. We discussed these findings in relation to their relevance for language acquisition and for the early assessment of linguistic competence.
Highlights
The aim of this work was to study the influence of factors traditionally considered related to initial language acquisition
Quadratic, and exponential models were chosen for the analysis, as they are appropriate for the field of child development [106]
Our study clearly shows that, among pre-linguistic factors, verbal imitation explains the highest percentage of the variance of expressive vocabulary, as was found in previous studies [74,75,76,80]
Summary
The aim of this work was to study the influence of factors traditionally considered related to initial language acquisition. With regard to communicative development, typically developing children have already discovered patterns of meaning in speech by the end of their first year of life [1,2]. It is around this time that children start to discover connections between language and the world around them [3,4]. Any disruption at this initial stage will affect a child’s linguistic development as well as other related forms of development and subsequent learning experiences [5]
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