Lexical Diversity in Cypriot-Greek-Speaking Toddlers: A Preliminary Longitudinal Study

Abstract

<b><i>Background/Aims:</i></b> The number of different words (NDW), an essential measure of lexical diversity, is extremely valuable towards providing data regarding children’s language development. However, in Cyprus, practitioners are deprived of the opportunity to utilize NDW, as no normative data exist for toddlers who speak Cypriot Greek (CYG). <b><i>Methods:</i></b> The language samples of 36 monolingual CYG-speaking toddlers (aged 36, 40, 44, and 48 months) with a typical course of language development were collected and quantitatively analyzed. Based on the language sample analysis, we ascertained typical NDW values at the aforementioned ages and tested through a linear mixed-effects model whether gender and age affected NDW. <b><i>Results:</i></b> The results showed that age significantly predicted NDW increase; gender did not emerge as a significant predictor of NDW, but this may be due to the small statistical power. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> This study intends to provide the first step towards longitudinal investigation of the level of NDW for CYG-speaking children with a typical course of language development. The provided data, which could serve as preliminary norms, may be used – under some restrictions for the time being – during language assessment. Moreover, these acquired data could contribute to the development of an NDW database for diverse CYG-speaking populations of different age ranges in the future.

Replicating the comparison between item-based tests and language samples in Portuguese kindergarteners’ language assessment

“…As for the fourth hypothesis, it was confirmed that boys and girls generally presented the same levels of performance. This outcome is in line with reported outcomes of studies run with similar age groups regarding the MLU (e.g., Santos et al, 2015;Voniati, 2016), lexical diversity (e.g., Voniati et al, 2020), TNW (Hamdani et al, 2019), vocabulary (Lange et al, 2016), and item-based testing (e.g., Araújo et al, 2010). Recent evidence indicates that sex differences in langu-PORTUGUESE KINDERGARTENERS' LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT age skills seem to be negligible and tend to disappear at the end of kindergarten (Etchell et al, 2018;Kidd & Donnelly, 2020).…”

“…Like with item-based tests, previous studies have found associations between age and several narrative measures (Owens & Pavelko, 2020;Rice et al, 2010;Voniati, 2016;Voniati et al, 2020;Westerveld & Vidler, 2016;Wu, 2020). However, according to Voniati (2016), although MLU-w may be an index that increases with age, it may also depend on experience.…”