Rujas, I. 1 , Mariscal, S. 2 , Casla, M. 1 & Galera, N. 1
1 Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
2 Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
Research on early language acquisition has found a bidirectional relationship between phonological and lexical development (Gathercole, 2006; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989, 1990; Hoff, Core, & Bridges, 2008; Stoel-Gammon, 1991, 2011; Velleman & Vihman, 2006; Vihman, 1981, 1993). In order to examine this relationship we conducted a one-year longitudinal study with children aged 2;06-3;06 who were assessed at three different times. Twenty-three typically developing children (TD) and 15 late talking children (LT) participated in this study. Late talking children scored below percentile 15 in the Spanish version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (López-Ornat, Gallego, Gallo, Karousou, Mariscal, & Martínez, 2005). We designed and administered two experimental tasks to assess phonological and lexical development: a word and nonword repetition task, and a fast mapping task (split into a noun task and verb task that included singular and verbal morphemes). Results show that: a) late talking children perform worse in both tasks compared to typically developing children; b) children perform better in time 3 compared to time 1; and c) performance in the repetition task correlates with performance in the fast mapping task. Interactions between assessing times, vocabulary levels and frequency of words and morphemes were found. These results encourage the discussion about the predictive relationships between word and nonword repetition tasks - as measures of phonological development - and fast-mapping tasks - as measures of early lexical development -. Moreover, we will examine the different developmental patterns of TD and LT children, and we will go into some of the possible sources that may help us understand these differences.