Galician CDI

The Galician version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (Inventario do Desenvolvemento de Habilidades Comunicativas, IDHC) has been used over the past two decades to investigate early communicative and linguistic development in children across Galicia, a bilingual region of Spain. Two research topics have been explored within the framework of the European Network on the Communicative Development Inventory (EUNM-CDI). The first research topic involved cross-linguistic comparisons: Studies comparing Galician with Basque and European Portuguese revealed similar developmental trajectories in vocabulary and grammar. A large-scale study comparing ten European languages found gender differences in early communicative development. The second topic of research employed the Galician CDI in a longitudinal project involving low-risk preterm children, whose language development was monitored them from infancy to nine years of age. Results showed that healthy preterm children do not differ significantly from their full-term peers in terms of language development when medical complications are absent, and that cognitive, communicative, and temperamental factors are the best predictors of later linguistic outcomes. The present article provides an overview of these two topics of research, synthesising their main findings and highlighting their contribution to our understanding of early language development in bilingual and minority-language contexts.