Empirically based solutions for the Serbian adaptation of a parent report inventory used in the assessment of child language development

Abstract

The study is aimed at providing empirical basis for the adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates' Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) for Serbian language, a parent report instrument for the language development assessment. Two sources of data were used in order to provide the basis for selection of items and evaluation of their linguistic, cultural and developmental validity: a. Serbian Corpus of Early Child Language (SCECL), and b. focus groups with experts and parents/caregivers. Exploration of the frequency of words/forms in Serbian child language and the qualitative analysis of focus groups discussions provided criteria for selection/adjustment of items in the course of inventory adaptation. The results also revealed that parents are naturally more focused on semantic and communicational aspects of utterances, and insufficiently aware of formal properties of their children's production. The paper presents significant changes and modifications of the instrument in the course of its adaptation for Serbian, which is a step closer to the final aim - providing a standardized instrument for the assessment of language development in Serbian.