Early vocabulary and grammar development in Albanian-speaking children: a MB-CDI adaptation study

Abstract

This is the first study of a large sample of Albanian-speaking children and their communicative development, based on the Albanian adaptation of MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Parental report data were collected from 112 children between the ages of 13 and 36 months. Growth curves for early vocabulary were characterized. Developmental trajectories of children with various demographic characteristics, such as sex and parental education were compared. Results show that the lexical growth curves for Albanian are comparable to those reported for other languages; sex is also correlated with vocabulary size. And, lastly, parental education of both mothers and fathers are both found to influence vocabulary size, while fathers’ education is also correlated with early grammatical development. It is recommended that Albanian CDI is a useful tool for the assessment of and research on the language development of Albanian-speaking children. Future directions include testing larger numbers of children from different dialect and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Keywords

• Albanian
• early language development
• MB-CDI