Early lexical and grammar development in Norwegian language acquisition

Abstract

This study was a case study of two monolingual Norwegian children S and JK. Both children are born and raised in the same area, by parents with similar academic and economic backgrounds. S was 21 months old at the onset of the study, and JK was 20 months old. Their vocabulary development was measured on the Norwegian CDI developed by Kristoffersen et al. (2012), MLU was used in order to track their grammatical development. Their language development was tracked between May 2012 and June 2012.

The aim of the study was to compare their development in vocabulary size and grammatical proficiency to determine whether a link between grammar and vocabulary, as proposed by Bates and Goodman (1997), can be found in Norwegian. Part of the aim was also to develop a Norwegian MLU protocol.

An analysis of the results indicated that a link between grammar and vocabulary size exists in Norwegian, and that using the proposed MLU protocol gives valid results. This suggests that Bates and Goodman’s (1997) claimed link between grammar and vocabulary size might be a cross-linguistic phenomenon, but data from more languages need to be analysed in order to determine this.