The very first words of Estonian children: A comparison of two parental report types

Abstract

Background: Parental recognition has been shown to produce more accurate information about child’s vocabulary compared to remembering. The differences in reporting vocabulary are of interest. Our aims were to determine the extent of vocabulary overlap in the two report types, to identify the word report frequency and the proportions of word categories according to the report type. Methods: The subjects were 219 children (125 boys and 94 girls) at the age of 0;8 to 1;4 (M = 10.41, SD = 1.96) who had one to three words reported in the ECDI Infant Form. In this study parents reported children’s current vocabulary in two ways: Estonian version of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Language and Gestures (henceforth ECDI Infant Form) and free recall. Results: On 40% of occasions a word was reported in both ways. Three most frequent words in both report types were aitah 'thanks', namm-namm 'yum-yum', and emme 'mommy'. Words belonging to the categories of sound effects and animal sounds as well as social terms had higher average frequency of reports than common nouns regardless of report type. Conclusions: These results may reflect differences in what parents consider to be a word and raise a question of social desirability in parental reports.