The article discusses the methodology and the preliminary results of the research project entitled “Latvian language in Monolingual and Bilingual Acquisition: tools, theories and applications” (LAMBA). The project involves 25 researchers – linguists, educators, psychologists – from five institutions in Latvia and Norway, and focuses on phonological, lexical and morphosyntactic acquisition of Latvian as a native language in monolingual and bilingual settings. One of the main goals of the project is to develop a set of norm-referenced language assessment tools that would allow for accurate and time-efficient evaluation of language development in pre-school children.The article will focus specifically on the Latvian adaptation of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories – a parental report tool that assesses the development of receptive and productive vocabulary, and certain aspects of grammar. Two CDI forms were adapted in the project: CDI Words and Gestures designed for use with children between 8 and 16 months of age, and CDI Words and Sentences designed for 16- to 36-month old children. Each CDI form contains extensive and language-specific checklists of lexical items, communicative gestures and grammatical constructions.

In this article we report the results of a large-scale population study based on the Latvian adaptation of Communicative Development Inventories (CDI, Fenson et al. 2007)a parental report tool aimed at mapping the lexical and grammatical development of children under the age of three. Two CDI forms are discussed: CDI I: "Words and Gestures" (8-16 months), and CDI II: "Words and Sentences" (17-36 months). This article discusses the internet-based methodology used for the data collection, reports the main developmental trends of the lexical development of Latvian children, and compares these trends to analogous data from American English, Norwegian, and Russian.

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This paper reports on the development of spell checking and morphological analysis tools for Latgalian. The Latgalian written language is a historic variant of the Latvian language. There is a wide range of language analysis tools available for Latvian, whereas the Latgalian language lacks such tools. The work is done by the joint effort of linguists who work on morphologically marked lexicon creation and IT specialists who work on language tool development. For the creation of a morphological analysis tool, we reuse the FST technology used for the Latvian morphological analyzer. We create a spelling dictionary that can be used with the Hunspell engine. All tools are accessible via Web Service. For now, the Latgalian lexicon contains 13,139 lemmas marked by 105 inflection groups. The work of lexicon replenishment still continues.