Describes short-form versions of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) and their development, summarizes newly available normative data and psychometric properties of the instruments, and discusses research and clinical applications. (Author/VWL)

Examined word retrieval in 14- to 24-month-olds. Found that children with limited productive vocabularies were less likely to produce labels of hidden objects than children with larger vocabularies, even though all could name them and did well when asked to find them. Pictorial cues facilitated word retrieval. Naming errors peaked among children…

A study involving 113 children (ages 24-37 months) with hearing impairments found expressive vocabulary was related to the child's age, the age of identification of the child's hearing loss (before or after 6 months), the child's cognitive quotient, and the presence or absence of one or more additional disabilities. (Contains extensive…

Explores the possibility that particular properties of how number words are used within sentences inform children of the semantic class to which they belong. Analysis of transcripts of the spontaneous speech of three children and their parents suggests that the relevant cues are available as input in parents' speech to children and that children…

Development of children's vocabularies for gender-typed words and communicative actions was investigated longitudinally from 13 to 36 months and in a group of 9.5-month-olds. Vocabularies of gendered words were assessed using lists of adult-rated gender-typed words from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; L. Fenson et…

Data from the Cantonese Communicative Development Inventory (CCDI) is used to review the phonological preferences of younger (16-22 months) and older (23-30 month) groups of children in the lexical items they are reported to be able to say. Analogous results to those found for English emerge from the Cantonese data: the younger group display…

Seventy-two 2-year-olds participated in a study designed to test two competing accounts of the effect of contextual change on children's ability to learn a word for an object. The mechanistic account hypothesizes that any change in context that highlights a target object will lead to word learning; the social-pragmatic account maintains that a…

A study of two year olds investigated the nature and development of children's early productivity with verb-argument structure and verb morphology. Results indicated that the children showed no signs of productive verb morphology, but they did use newly learned verbs in some creative ways involving nounlike uses and the appending of locatives.…

Investigated birth-order differences in children's early vocabulary development. Compared the composition and age of acquisition of the first 50 and 100 words of 9 firstborns and their younger siblings, using a longitudinal maternal diary methodology. A small but significant birth-order effect was found for the age at which the 50-word milestone…

This paper outlines the degree to which age and verb vocabulary size are predictive of changes in the reported usage of English verbs that are irregular in their past tense form in a sample of more than 1,000 children. (Contains 40 references.) (JL)

This study examines the processes underlying vocabulary acquisition, i.e., how new words are learned, in children with Williams Syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder. A Williams Syndrome group was compared to groups of normal controls in the range 3-9 years in four different experiments testing for constraints on word learning. (Author/JL)

Language and reading outcomes at age 13 were examined in 22 children who were late talkers as toddlers. Compared to 14 controls, children who were late talkers had significantly poorer vocabulary, grammar, reading/spelling, and verbal memory skills, although they performed in the average range on most language and academic tasks. (Contains…

Two experiments examined toddlers' noun vocabularies and interpretations of names for solid and non-solid items. Results indicated that one side of the solidity-syntax-category organization mapping was favored. Seventeen- to 33-month olds do not systematically generalize names for solid things by shape similarity until they already know many…

Two experiments examined differences in the early noun learning of English- and Japanese-speaking children. Found that English-speaking children's vocabularies were heavily lopsided with many more object than animal names, whereas Japanese-speaking children's vocabularies were more evenly balanced. Results suggested that early learners of English…

Two hundred forty English-speaking toddlers (24- and 36-month-olds) heard novel adjectives applied to familiar objects (Experiment 1) and novel objects (Experiment 2). Children were successful in mapping adjectives to target properties only when information provided by the noun, in conjunction with participants' knowledge of the objects, provided…