Early language skill is predictive of many later life outcomes and is thus of great interest to developmental psychologists and clinicians. The MacArthur‐Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs), parent report instruments typically containing inventories of hundreds of children's vocabulary words, have proven to be valid and reliable instruments for measuring children's early language skill. The CDIs have been adapted to many dozens of languages, and cross‐linguistic comparisons show both consistency and variability in language acquisition trajectories. However, thousands of languages do not (...) yet have CDIs, nor the early language corpora needed to create them, posing a significant barrier to increasing the diversity of languages that are studied. Here, we propose a method for selecting candidate words to include on new CDIs through analyzing psychometric properties of the translation‐equivalent concepts that are frequently included on existing CDIs. Leveraging 32 datasets from existing CDIs, we propose a list of 100 concepts that have low variability in their cross‐linguistic learning difficulty. This pool of common concepts—analogous to the Swadesh lists, which are basic vocabulary lists used in glottochronology for cross‐language comparison—can be used as a starting point for future CDI adaptations. We show that the proposed Swadesh‐CDI list generalizes well to data from 10 additional languages. (shrink)

The productive use of English past tense morphology in school-aged children (N= 74; 3 years, 8 months to 13 years, 5 months) is explored using on elicited production task. Errors represented 20% of the responses overall. Virtually all of the children demonstrated productivity with regular (e.g., good) and irregular patterns (zero-marking, e.g., sit + sit; vowel-change, e.g., ride -+ rid). Overall frequency of errors decreased with age, yet the tendency for certain types of irregularizations increased in the older groups. Analyses (...) across items indicated that all error types were predicted by combinations of item frequency, phonological chamcteristics of stems and past tense forms, and aspects of phonological past tense “neighborhoods.” Contrary to “hybrid” or dual-mechanism models incorporating a phonologically-insensitive default mechanism (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993), these results suggest that children’s productivity with regular and irregular patterns is consistent with a phonologically-based constraint satisfaction system similar to that implemented in connectionist models (Daugherty & Seidenberg, 1992; Plunkett 81 Marchman, 1991,1993). (shrink)

Comments on G. Marcus' criticisms (see record 1996-24670-001) of K. Plunkett's and V. Marcham's (see record 1994-35650-001) connectionist account of the acquisition of the English past tense (verb morphology). The original model is reviewed. Graphing, overregularization, and other criticisms are addressed (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2000 APA, all rights reserved).