Cattani, A. , Naftanaila, C. , Gunning, L. , Jenkins, H. & Floccia, C.
Plymouth University, UK
The knowledge of lexicon skills achieved by toddlers is generally acquired through parental questionnaires (e.g. CDI inventory, Hamilton et al., 2000) which require parents to fill-in the number of words understood and produced by their child. A new picture naming task, recently developed and validated for Italian children (Bello, Giannantoni, Pettenati, Stefanini & Caselli, 2012) which assesses four lexical subcomponents (comprehension and production of nouns and predicates), is now in the process of adaptation to an English version. The aim of this research is to assess the applicability of the newly adapted English version and to compare the developmental trend of the lexicon subcomponents of the two versions. The 120 picture cards were first shown to a group of adults to assess the name agreement and only 2 cards were replaced. Then, a cross-sectional sample of 92 children between the ages of 21, 24, 27, 30 and 36 months was assessed in the adapted English naming task together with the equivalent age CDI, SETK-2 word naming task and, according to the age, the British Scale Vocabulary (Dunn et al., 2009) or the Preschool Language Scale (PLS4, Zimmerman et al., 2009) to assess the test reliability. We analysed the percentages of correct responses and type of errors divided into semantically related, non-semantically related and non-responses of the picture naming task. While there is an indication of a slow start for the youngest English children, all older children reached the ceiling of words understood and produced like the Italian data. The analyses of the type of errors revealed that the higher percentages of non-responses in the errors found in English children might be an effect due to cultural differences of the children while performing the test.