Conference Contribution Details
Mandatory Fields
O'Toole, C., & Hickey, T.
Child Language Impairment in Multilingual Contexts
The Irish-English Communicative Development Inventory: A longitudinal study of bilingual language acquisition in a minority language context
Krakow, Poland
Poster Presentation
2013
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0
Optional Fields
27-MAY-13
29-MAY-13
                          

Irish is now a threatened minority language in Ireland which is generally acquired in a bilingual context with English and shows significant influence from English. For this reason, the adaptation of the MacArthur- Bates Communicative Development Inventories to Irish involved developing a single bilingual test in order to produce the most accurate and sensitive profile of children’s acquisition of Irish and English.  Here we report on how children aged 17-36 months acquired vocabulary, including total vocabulary and total conceptual vocabulary across word classes, and how variables such as language environment and risk factors for language impairment influenced the outcomes. Of particular interest are the longitudinal data in this study which enabled us to assess the impact of the changing language environment (measured by the Developmental and Language Background Questionnaire created for the COST project) on the acquisition of Irish and English vocabulary in individuals over time. The results contributed to a larger crosslinguistic study on early vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children within Working Group 3 of the COST Action IS0804the COST Action.

COST Action IS0804