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The Sixth

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON MALAY/INDONESIAN LINGUISTICS

3 - 5 August 2002

Nirwana Resort Hotel, Bintan Island, Riau, Indonesia


First Words in Malay: Parental Report of Infant Language Acquisition Using The Communicative Developmental Inventory Infants
Thow Mei Kuen, Linda Blankanette, Shafida Saiman, Susan Rickard Liow & Rogayah A.Razak
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
swksusan@nus.edu.sg

This paper reports preliminary normative data for Malay speaking infants aged 12 and 18 months on an adapted version of the Communicative Development Inventory (CDI). We used a cross-sectional design (N=32) in both groups and asked parents to provide data for common phrases, word comprehension, word production, and gestures. After collating the responses, we re-ranked the items for the Malay version of the CDI. Our analysis of the parental report show that there is a gradual increase of vocabulary comprehension and production throughout the percentile scores over age groups. With regards to semantic categories and early words, the 18-months age group performed better than the 12 months age group. There were words which were not present in the 12 months old group but were significant in the 18 months old group. The analysis also shows that there were significant gestural differences between the two age-groups. A discussion of these findings will be undertaken. This new assessment tool facilitates the early identification of children at risk of SLI, and allows comparisons for order of acquisition with English-speaking age peers.


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