4. Conclusion

Early vocabulary development is a reliable predictor of children’s later language skills. Given the significance of early childhood lexicon, and the tools available to assess it, it is important that we develop large-scale comparative data sets for the understanding of lexical development in a variety of languages. CDI has provided a powerful tool in this regard, and it has been applied to the study of several languages, and for a variety of questions (see Goodman, Dale & Li, 2008, for a recent analysis of the role of frequency with CDI).

In this article, we report our efforts in developing a similar inventory for Mandarin Chinese, and discuss the data collected, using this new instrument, from 884 Chinese families in Beijing from 12 to 30 months of age. We have attempted to correct problems seen in previous efforts in using the CDI to study early vocabulary acquisition in Chinese-speaking children. Chinese children’s receptive and expressive lexicons as assessed by our instrument match well with those reported in the English CDI analyses. In particular, our data indicate comprehension-production differences, individual differences in early comprehension and in later production, and different lexical development profiles among infants (12~16 months-relatively slow growth) versus toddlers (17~30 months-much more rapid increase).

In developing the Mandarin early vocabulary inventory, we also have in mind the aim of making the actual lexical norms available to the general research community over the Internet. Readers of this article should consult our Web site(cogsci.richmond.edu) and the Psychonomic Society Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data (www.psychonomic.org/archive) for updated versions of the lexical norms discussed in this article.