Abstract
This article presents data on lexical development of 881 Israeli Hebrew-speaking monolingual toddlers ages 1;0 to 2;0. A Web-based version of the Hebrew MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (H-MB-CDI) was used for data collection. Growth curves for expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, actions and gestures were characterized. Developmental trajectories of toddlers with various demographic characteristics, such as education, income, religiosity level, birth order of the child, and child-care arrangements were compared. Results show that the lexical growth curves for Hebrew are comparable to those reported for other languages. Sex, birth order, and child-care arrangements were found to influence the size of lexicons. It is recommended that the trajectories presented here be used as norms for lexical growth among typical Hebrew-speaking toddlers in the second year of life.
Highlights
Lexical development trajectories are important for comparing the lexical levels of children who acquire the same language and for cross-linguistic comparisons
This paper presents a cross-sectional, web-based study of the Hebrew MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI) words and gestures (WG) version
Growth curves were fit using the Growth Charts Regression Quantiles function from the R package quantregGrowth (Muggeo, Sciandra, Tomasello & Calvo, 2013), which fits non-crossing regression quantiles as a function of linear covariates and multiple smooth terms via B-splines with L1-norm difference penalties
Summary
Lexical development trajectories are important for comparing the lexical levels of children who acquire the same language and for cross-linguistic comparisons. One of the most commonly used instruments for assessing early lexical development is the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI), which was initially constructed for American English-speaking children (Fenson et al, 1994; Frank, Braginsky, Yurovsky & Marchman, in press). This instrument relies on parents’ report about the words used by their children in closed lists of items. Throughout the last three decades, the MB-CDI lists have been adapted to more than 60 languages (Frank, Braginsky, Yurovsky & Marchman, 2017) and were found to be valid and reliable for collecting data on the development of toddlers’ lexicons (for an overview, see Fenson et al, 2007)
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