Osvojovanie slovesnej lexiky v ranej ontogenéze reči / Werbs Acquisition in Early Childhood

The main aim of the study is to introduce a new method which has not been applied in the Slovak study of child language so far, and to answer 4 main research questions: (1) What is the development of understanding and production of verbs in early lexical development of Slovak-speaking children? (2) Are there any differences in verbs understanding and production between Slovak-speaking girls and boys? (3) What is the linguistic picture of the world given by incipient verbal lexicon of Slovak-speaking children? (4) Is there any difference between the linguistic picture of the world of Slovak-speaking girls and boys? The method is based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the lexical part of the Slovak version of CDI 1 Test of communicative abilities TEKOS 1: Words and gestures with 44 verbs in the part “actions and states”. Parents were asked to fill in the checklist and choose from three options: i) child understands and speaks, ii) understands, iii) does not understand The research sample consists of 323 girls and 330 boys in their age from 8 to 16 months. The results show the unanimous developmental trajectory in verbs acquisition in both, girls and boys. The differences shown in production in favor of girls in last two months are not statistically significant. The linguistic picture of the world is cognitively and semantically gender-universal, concentrated on corporeal concepts connected with social concept. The prototypical verbs in first 16 months of the age of the children are jesť (to eat) and dať (to give)