engleski

Sex differences in lexical and grammatical development in Croatian

A great number of papers on the entwining lexical and grammatical development in various languages has been published. Despite that, it is still missing a harmonized explanation about lexical development, and its relations with morphological development. For some authors (e.g. Goldfield, Reznick 1990) the vocabulary burst or lexical spurt triggers the grammatical development while for others, the lexical development is characterized by a series of small bursts or stairstep pattern (e.g. Bates et al., 1995 ; Kovacevic, et al. 1996) assumed that in Croatian the acquisition of morphology affects the lexical development in a way that lexical development is interrupted by morphology. The periods when lexical development slows down while morphology is in process of acquisition Kovacevic et. al. called transition phase. This still actual debate about lexical-grammatical development could be observed in various groups of children: typically developing children, late talkers and early talkers. CDI as a standardized tool allows analyses of children's language performance in different language variables and different groups of children. In this paper the main aim is to outline the lexical and grammatical development in three groups of children (typically developing children, late talkers and early talkers) in respect to sex differences. It has been frequently proved that girls have better performance in various language areas (e.g. lexical development, morphological acquisition, narrative ability). Analyzing the data of children acquiring Croatian the differences between boys and girls among groups and within each group on the language performances have been found. Although girls have shown better performance on most of the lexical and grammatical tasks, statistically significant differences are found only in some of the language variables.

CDI; sex; lexical and grammatical development; child language

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