Sources of individual variation in Estonian toddlers’ expressive vocabulary

Abstract

The vocabulary size of 16- to 30-month-old children ( N = 1235) was assessed using the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences (ECDI-II). The relationship between children’s expressive vocabulary size and different factors of the child and his/her social environment was examined. Results confirm the findings of studies from other languages showing that girls have larger vocabularies than boys, and first-born children are at an advantage compared to later-born children. Children of highly educated parents have bigger vocabularies than children whose parents have a lower educational level; this effect was significant for both maternal and paternal education. It was found that children of less-educated fathers who spend a high amount of time per week (> 40 hours) in daycare have smaller vocabularies than children of fathers with higher educational attainment.

Parental reports of communicative development at the age of 36 months: The Estonian CDI-III

“…The existing Estonian CDIs (ECDIs) similarly assess language development below three years of age. ECDI-I is for Estonian-speaking children from the age of 8 to 16 months (Schults & Tulviste, 2016) and ECDI-II for those 16 to 30 months of age (Tulviste, 2007; Urm & Tulviste, 2016). Children with a slow onset of word production can be classified as late talkers at two years of age (Ellis Weismer, 2007).…”

“…Our ongoing norming study of ECDI-III aims to collect representative norming data from 540 children (from 30 boys and 30 girls from each two-month period) to cover the age span between 2;6 and 4;0. In addition, we are conducting a longitudinal study to gather the validation data by means of ECDI-III as well as ECDI-II (Urm & Tulviste, 2016) and New Reynell Developmental Language Scales (Edwards, Letts, & Sinka, 2011). This article presents the results of the first wave of the longitudinal study when children were roughly 3;0 years old.…”

“…On the other hand, day care attendance measured by the number of months has been shown not to have any effect on the number of words produced by the child (Cadime et al, 2018). Studies conducted with Estonian infants and toddlers have reported associations between vocabulary size on the one hand and, on the other hand, the child’s gender, sibling status, length of stay at day care per week, and parental education (Schults et al, 2012; Tulviste, 2007; Urm & Tulviste, 2016).…”

“…Some research findings showed that gender differences in language development are larger in lower SES compared to upper SES families (Barbu et al, 2015). Furthermore, the boys who spent a long time at day care (more than 40 hrs per week) and whose fathers had low education had smaller vocabularies (Urm & Tulviste, 2016). The present study will check whether the previous findings concerning the factors responsible for the variability in vocabulary size are valid when vocabulary is measured by ECDI-III.…”

Stern, gwiazda or star: Screening receptive vocabulary skills across languages in monolingual and bilingual German–Polish or German–Turkish children using a tablet application

“…Those results also underpin the need to have a more in depth look at what influences vocabulary acquisition (Bornstein et al, 1998) and include paternal data which often has been neglected in earlier research. That various factors, including paternal education, have an impact on children's language performance was demonstrated for example by Urm and Tulviste (2016). They found that children spending 40 hours or more in daycare per week and had fathers with a high educational background, outperformed children with fathers with a lower educational level on expressive vocabulary scores (p. 592).…”