Šmit Brleković Lidija, Kuvač Kraljević Jelena
Postgraduate Doctoral Programme Speech, Language and Hearing Disorders, Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia.
Department of Speech and Language Pathology, Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jul 20;14:1188550. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1188550. eCollection 2023.
Previous studies have focused on understanding parental attempts to record language development in children, across many typologically different languages. However, many of these studies restricted their assessment to children up to the age of 3 years. The aim of this paper was to move this boundary by examining language development in typically language developed children older than 3 years.
Using the Croatian version of the Communicative Development Inventories III (CDI-III-HR), we investigated the contribution of parental reports of a child's lexical, grammatical, and metalinguistic awareness abilities to general language abilities assessed by clinicians. Participants included the parents of 151 children between the ages of 30 to 48 months, who completed the CDI-III-HR and reported on their child's language abilities.
Our results show that age is significantly associated with the lexical, grammatical, and metalinguistic awareness abilities of a child's language development. These findings confirm that all three abilities increase with age and that parents can perceive changes in a child's language development. The subsections of CDI-III-HR were moderately to strongly associated with each other, with the strongest association being between lexicon and grammar, suggesting that they remain closely related after the age of 30 months. Parental assessments of a child's language development are a better predictor of language production than language comprehension, with grammar making the most consistent and significant contribution.
This study confirms that the development of grammatical abilities is the most prominent skill between the ages of 30 to 48 months and that parents can observe the transition in the child's language development through their usage of grammar in words to grammar in sentences. Based on the selected sample of children, we discovered different patterns of parental success in assessing the child's language ability. These findings indicate that parents can act as valuable sources of information regarding the child's language abilities, but clinical assessments of early language development should consider many other formal sources of information in addition to parental reports.
以往的研究主要集中在理解父母记录不同类型语言环境中儿童语言发展的尝试。然而，这些研究大多将评估对象限制在3岁以下的儿童。本文的目的是通过研究3岁以上语言发育正常儿童的语言发展来突破这一界限。
我们使用克罗地亚语版的《沟通发展量表III》（CDI-III-HR），研究了父母报告的儿童词汇、语法和元语言意识能力对临床医生评估的一般语言能力的贡献。参与者包括151名年龄在30至48个月之间儿童的父母，他们完成了CDI-III-HR并报告了孩子的语言能力。
我们的结果表明，年龄与儿童语言发展中的词汇、语法和元语言意识能力显著相关。这些发现证实，这三种能力都随年龄增长，并且父母能够察觉到孩子语言发展的变化。CDI-III-HR的各个子部分之间存在中度到强的相关性，其中词汇和语法之间的相关性最强，这表明在30个月之后它们仍然密切相关。父母对孩子语言发展的评估在预测语言表达方面比语言理解方面更好，语法的贡献最为一致且显著。
本研究证实，语法能力的发展是30至48个月期间最突出的技能，并且父母可以通过孩子从单词中的语法运用到句子中的语法运用来观察其语言发展的转变。基于所选的儿童样本，我们发现了父母在评估孩子语言能力方面的不同成功模式。这些发现表明，父母可以作为有关孩子语言能力的宝贵信息来源，但早期语言发展的临床评估除了父母报告之外还应考虑许多其他正式的信息来源。
