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A comparison of the transition from first words to grammar in English and Italian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 1999

CRISTINA CASELLI ,
PAOLA CASADIO  and
ELIZABETH BATES
CRISTINA CASELLI
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychology, National Council of Research, Rome
PAOLA CASADIO
Affiliation:
Santa Lucia Neurological Clinic and Research Center, Rome
ELIZABETH BATES
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Abstract

Cross-linguistic similarities and differences in early lexical and grammatical development are reported for 1001 English-speaking children and 386 Italian-speaking children between 1;6 and 2;6. Parents completed the English or Italian versions of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences, a parent report instrument that provides information about vocabulary size, vocabulary composition and grammatical complexity across this age range. The onset and subsequent growth of nouns, predicates, function words and social terms proved to be quite similar in both languages. No support was found for the prediction that verbs would emerge earlier in Italian, although Italians did produce a higher proportion of social terms, and there were small but intriguing differences in the shape of the growth curve for grammatical function words. A strikingly similar nonlinear relationship between grammatical complexity and vocabulary size was observed in both languages, and examination of the order in which function words are acquired also yielded more similarities than differences. However, a comparison of the longest sentences reported for a subset of children demonstrates large cross-linguistic differences in the amount of morphology that has been acquired in children matched for vocabulary size. Discussion revolves around the interplay between language-specific variations in the input to young children, and universal cognitive and social constraints on language development.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , February 1999 , pp. 69 - 111
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Support for this project was provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Childhood Transitions (R. Emde, Director), by NIDCD/NIH Grant PO50 DC01289-0351 (E. Bates, Principal Investigator) and by the National Council of Research Institute of Psychology, Via Nomentana 56 (V. Volterra, Laboratory Director). Our thanks to Virginia Volterra for detailed comments on an earlier draft, to the large network of investigators in both countries who contributed to the large base of norming data placed at our disposal, and to the 1387 families who took the time to participate in this study.