Devescovi Antonella, Caselli Maria Cristina, Marchione Daniela, Pasqualetti Patrizio, Reilly Judy, Bates Elizabeth
Department of Development and Socialization Processes, University of Rome La Sapienza, Via dei Marsi 78, Rome, Italy.
J Child Lang. 2005 Nov;32(4):759-86. doi: 10.1017/s0305000905007105.
The relationship between grammatical and lexical development was compared in 233 English and 233 Italian children aged between 1;6 and 2;6, matched for age, gender, and vocabulary size on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Four different measures of Mean Length of Utterance were applied to the three longest utterances reported by parents, and to corrected/expanded versions representing the 'target' for each utterance. Italians had longer MLUs on most measures, but the ratio of actual to target MLUs did not differ between languages. Age and vocabulary both contributed significant variance to MLU, but the contribution of vocabulary was much larger, suggesting that vocabulary size may provide a better basis for crosslinguistic comparisons of grammatical development. The relationship between MLU and vocabulary size was non-linear in English but linear in Italian, suggesting that grammar 'gets off the ground' earlier in a richly inflected language. A possible mechanism to account for this difference is discussed.
对233名年龄在1岁6个月至2岁6个月之间的英国儿童和233名意大利儿童的语法和词汇发展关系进行了比较，这些儿童在年龄、性别以及麦克阿瑟沟通发展量表（CDI）的词汇量方面相互匹配。对家长报告的三个最长话语应用了四种不同的平均话语长度测量方法，并应用于代表每个话语“目标”的修正/扩展版本。在大多数测量方法中，意大利儿童的平均话语长度更长，但实际平均话语长度与目标平均话语长度的比率在不同语言之间没有差异。年龄和词汇量都对平均话语长度有显著影响，但词汇量的影响要大得多，这表明词汇量大小可能为语法发展的跨语言比较提供更好的基础。平均话语长度与词汇量大小之间的关系在英语中是非线性的，而在意大利语中是线性的，这表明在一种词形变化丰富的语言中，语法“起步”更早。文中讨论了一种可能解释这种差异的机制。
