A vocabulary checklist for early lexical development in Tseltal

This study presents a checklist for measuring the expressive vocabularies of young children acquiring the Mayan language Tseltal. Adapted from the vocabulary checklist of US English MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories, and tested with 84 Tseltal-acquiring children (9–23 months), this Tseltal checklist shows desired within- and across-subcategory variability in age of ac-quisition, expected age- and gender-related change, and typical patterns of relative over- and under-representation in the most cross-linguistically stable domains. We discuss potential uses of the check-list and the next steps in its future development.