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Parents’ reports are accepted in practice and can be a valid and reliable source of information in research on children’s communicative development and any delays in this. Nevertheless, parents’ reports may have important limitations that need to be considered: parental positive bias; parents’ understanding of the child language comprehension; and parents’ education and limited linguistic knowledge. In this paper, we take the stance that parents are most interested in an adequate assessment, and obtaining reliable input from them is certainly important. We amplify the voice of parents by synthesizing their experiences with a parental report inventory as a method based on the usage of the adapted version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. With that aim, we conducted a qualitative inductive thematic analysis of focus group discussions and additional open-ended validation questions. Six emerging themes and sub-themes were identified and presented with illustrative quotations. Results revealed that the adaptation of original CDIs to languages with radically different morphosyntactic structures may produce items that are hard to recognize and understand without a context. We bring to light parent-specific difficulties in performing this task and provide a critical understanding of parents’ reports as a method of language development assessment. We discuss potential solutions to parents’ dilemmas that inevitably arise when reporting on their child’s communication, as well as answers to researchers’/practitioners’ dilemmas regarding the validity and reliability of parental reporting.

Adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates’ CDIs for the Serbian language have provided pilot data on 126 children of 8-30 months of age. To explore the validity of data analyses were conducted on vocabulary size as well as on the items dedicated to grammatical development. The results showed a steady increase by age in receptive and expressive vocabulary size on both CDI questionnaires in all semantic domains. In contrast to early vocabularies typical for young children (up to 21 months of age) primarily composed of nouns, the elder children (from 22 months onwards) gradually made the transition to the usage of verbs, adverbials, and other close-classed function words. Steady growth was also found in older children on items dedicated to further grammatical development (the transition to the 3rd year of age). Moreover, complex morphological properties of Serbian language enabled exploration of the relationship between the vocabulary size and the growth of grammar at three different types of indications – how vocabulary growth is related with the use of functional words, the use of morphological marking, and the syntactic complexity of utterances in children’s production. The results showed that grammatical development is closely related to the increase in children's productive vocabulary size. Vocabulary size appeared to be a better predictor of early usage of morphologically marking than of syntactic complexity of utterances and the usage of functional words. Even though conducted on a limited sample, the analyzes also revealed bimodal distribution across age in the relationship between vocabulary and grammatical growth thus supporting previous findings that the dependence changes over developmental course.

Background Investigations of evolution knowledge and acceptance and their relation are central to evolution education research. Ambiguous results in this field of study demonstrate a variety of measuring issues, for instance differently theorized constructs, or a lack of standardized methods, especially for cross-country comparisons. In particular, meaningful comparisons across European countries, with their varying cultural backgrounds and education systems, are rare, often include only few countries, and lack standardization. To address these deficits, we conducted a standardized European survey, on 9200 first-year university students in 26 European countries utilizing a validated, comprehensive questionnaire, the “Evolution Education Questionnaire”, to assess evolution acceptance and knowledge, as well as influencing factors on evolution acceptance. Results We found that, despite European countries’ different cultural backgrounds and education systems, European first-year university students generally accept evolution. At the same time, they lack substantial knowledge about it, even if they are enrolled in a biology-related study program. Additionally, we developed a multilevel-model that determines religious faith as the main influencing factor in accepting evolution. According to our model, knowledge about evolution and interest in biological topics also increase acceptance of evolution, but to a much lesser extent than religious faith. The effect of age and sex, as well as the country’s affiliation, students’ denomination, and whether or not a student is enrolled in a biology-related university program, is negligible. Conclusions Our findings indicate that, despite all their differences, most of the European education systems for upper secondary education lead to acceptance of evolution at least in university students. It appears that, at least in this sample, the differences in knowledge between countries reflect neither the extent to which school curricula c

The aim of the study was to systematically assess the occurrence and age-related increase of functional words and specific grammatical parameters in the early language of Serbian children between 8 and 30 months of age based on the adapted version of MacArthur-Bates’ Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs). The sample included 126 mothers assessing their child’s language by means of the CDI-1 for ages 8-18 months, and CDI-2 for ages 16-30 months. The first questionnaire registers the occurrence of early grammatical words (pronouns, interrogatives, prepositions). The second is intended to evaluate the acquisition of the complex grammatical system: pronouns, prepositional constructions, noun morphology, modal and auxiliary verbs, conjugation, tense, negation, indicators of length and complexity of utterances. The results of the CDI-1 reveal the occurrence of early grammatical words at the age of 13 to 15 months: pronouns to 'this', moj/moja/moje ‘my’, and mene/me ‘me’, and the preposition o ‘on, about’. The first Wh-questions gde ‘where’ and kada ‘when’ appear at the same age. A larger variety of grammatical words in the sample was recorded at the age of 16 to 18 months: 9 pronouns out of 14 from the list are recorded, 11 prepositions (out of 12 from the list), as well as the first occurrence of the Wh-questions šta ’what’ and zašto ‘why’. Significant increase was recorded in CDI-2 for the following morpho-syntactic categories (five age groups in the range of 16-30 months, p<0.05): diminutive, possessive adjective, verb person, regular and irregular plural of nouns, preposition-case construction, negative verb forms, present and past tense, while the future tense is not mastered even at the older age levels. The longest utterance increases with age and reaches a length of 5.3 words at 25-27 months of age. The evidence of utterance complexity is recorded in the use of modal verbs, possessive pronouns, possessive adjectives, Wh-questions, dependent clause, direct v

The present study aims to explore the change of the vocabulary size and composition in the receptive and expressive language of Serbian speaking children between 8 and 30 months of age. It is a part of a broader project in relation to the adaptation of MacArthur-Bates’ Communicative Development Inventories for the Serbian language (CDIs; Fenson, Marchman, Thal, Dale, Reznick, & Bates, 2007). Two parental report inventories were applied: CDI-I for children 8-18 months, and CDI-II for children 16-30 months of age. The pilot study included 124 mothers from Belgrade (Serbia) and Banja Luka (Republic of Srpska, BiH) who filled in the inventories about their children's language and communicative status. The children’s gender was equally distributed in the sample. Over 70% of mothers had secondary high school education or lower, while the rest had a university degree. For the purpose of preliminary exploration of the vocabulary data obtained by the Serbian adaptation of CDIs scales, we: a) assessed the overall vocabulary growth, b) compared different lexical categories of words classified on the basis of communicational and/or morpho-syntactic functions - parts of speech like verbs and nouns, grammatical words (pronouns, prepositions), as well as early communicational expressions (pa-pa ‘bye-bye’); c. recorded the growth of different semantic categories of nouns relevant for the development of concepts (animals, toys, body parts, etc). The analysis revealed the trajectories of stable growth in children’s vocabulary size. The data show that development of receptive language in Serbian children is recorded early (already at 8 months) and is prevailing until the age of 18 months, while the expressive language starts around the first birthday. Nouns appear earlier than other categories of words and are followed by communicational expressions and verbs. Early comprehension of descriptive verbs and adverbials was recorded at 13-15 months, while their active usage was reported at

The aim of this study was to validate the preliminary Serbian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI-I and CDI-II; Fenson et al., 2007). The preliminary Serbian adaptation was based on two sources of data. The first source was the Serbian Corpus of Early Child Language (the CHILDES database) which we used to select and modify the items according to the local language and cultural context. The second source was focus groups with experts and parents/caregivers organized in order to qualitatively evaluate the pre-preliminary versions of the inventories. The findings from the focus groups were used to improve the parents’ understanding of the general instructions and individual grammar-related items, thus ensuring more valid reports on morphological and syntactic properties of their child’s language. As a result of these analyses, the preliminary Serbian version contains a larger number of items than the original version, and some structural changes in the grammar sections. The preliminary adapted version of the Serbian CDIs was used in the pilot study with a convenience sample of 123 mothers of children aged 8-18 months (N=62) and 16-30 months (N=61). The sample was equally distributed across different age groups (CDI-I: 8-9, 10-12, 13-15, 16-18 and CDI-II: 16-18, 19-21, 22-24, 25-27, 28-30) and gender (59 girls and 62 boys). The majority of mothers had secondary level education (high school) and the rest had higher level education or university. All the parents were from urban areas. The results revealed that older children perform better on all CDI scales, which was also followed by expectedly increased variability. We observed a continuous increase in the mean performance levels on Actions and gestures CDI-I (F/3,54/=52.47, p<0.01), Early communicational gestures CDI-I (F/3,54/=32.61, p<0.01), Later communicational gestures CDI-I (F/3,54/=53.53, p<0.01), and Receptive lexicon CDI-I (F/3,54/=27.14, p<0.01). Additionally, the overal

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.

Procena ranog komunikacijskog i govorno-jezičkog razvoja dece je vrlo značajan deo sistematskog praćenja psihičkog razvoja za koji se u svetu koriste standardizovani testovi i instrumenti. Jedan od najpoznatijih je Mekartur-Bejts inventar komunikacijskog razvoja (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories – CDI), originalno konstruisan na engleskom jeziku, a kasnije široko prevođen i adaptiran za više desetina jezika u svetu. Reč je o instrumentu specifičnom po tome što koristi izveštaj roditelja kao izvor podataka o ranom razvoju komunikacije i govora dece. Adaptacija ovog instrumenta za srpsko govorno područje podrazumevala je da se pitanja validnosti i pouzdanosti testa sagledavaju u svetlu specifičnih strukturalnih svojstava jezika, kao i kulturnih obeležja ove sredine. U radu prikazujemo postupke adaptacije instrumenta, izbora rečnika, releventnih gramatičkih struktura, i kulturno speci- fičnih komunikacijskih obeležja koji su morali biti obuhvaćeni inventarom. Pilot istraživanje za procenu validnosti sprovedeno je sa dva inventara koja čine ovaj test: Reči i gestovi (CDI I) za uzraste od 8-18 meseci, i Reči i rečenice (CDI II) za uzraste 16-30 meseci. Adaptacija oba inventara (CDI I i CDI II) urađena je u dve verzije srpskog jezika, ekavskoj i ijekavskoj. Prezentujemo prve rezultate pilot istraživanja sprovedenog na uzorku majki iz Beograda i Banja Luke. Između ostalog rezultati ukazuju i na problem roditeljskog izveštavanja o pojedinim aspektima gramatičkog razvoja. Roditelji su u komunikaciji sa detetom fokusirani na značenje, i teže prepoznaju i pamte formalne karakteristike dečijih iskaza kao što morfološka i sintaksička obeležja, pa su dalji postupci u adaptaciji instrumenta bili usmereni na povećanje validnosti roditeljskog izveštavanja i o ovim aspektima razvoja.

Izveštaj roditelja/staratelja značajan je izvor informacija o razvoju, i nezaobilazan je element u svakom postupku procenei dijagnostike dečjeg razvoja. Mekartur-Bejts inventar komunikacionog razvoja (MacArthurBates Communicative Development Inventories – CDIs) spada u one instrumente koji izveštaj roditelja koriste kao osnovno sredstvo u proceni razvoja govora i komunikacije. Adaptacija ovog instrumenta za srpski jezik pokrenula je neka od pitanja validnosti inventara namenjenog roditeljima. Cilj:U ovom radu prikazujemo rezultate preliminarne provere validnosti prve adaptirane verzije Mekartur-Bejts inventara za srpski jezik. Provera je rađena za dva inventara ovog instrumenta: Reči i gestovi (CDI I) za uzraste 8-18 meseci namenjenog proceni razvoja rečnika i simboličke funkcije i komunikacije,i Reči i rečenice (CDI II) za uzraste 16-30 meseci namenjenog proceni gramatičkog (morfološkog i sintaksičkog) razvoja. Adaptacijaoba inventara (CDI I i CDI II) urađena je u dve verzije srpskog jezika, ekavskoj i ijekavskoj, pa je tako planirana i evaluacija. Metod:Organizovane su četiri fokus grupe sa majkama dece odgovarajućeg uzrasta. Cilj razgovora bio je da se proveri koliko su upitnici razumljivi, da li majke shvataju šta se od njih očekuje, koliko su sigurne u davanju odgovora, koji delovi uputnika su teži, a koji lakši, da li treba nešto izmeniti/izbaciti/dodati. Rezultati: Pokazalo se da pojedini segmenti upitnika funkcionišu vrlo dobro – stavke se lako prepoznaju u rečniku i ponašanju, i jednostavno se razlikuju od onih čija pojava nije prisutna kod deteta. Međutim, postoje i problematični segmenti inventara (morfološki i sintaksički razvoj) koji od roditelja zahtevaju posebnu vrstu pažnje ili kompetenciju koju možda ne poseduju.Roditelji su svesni značenja detetovih reči i iskaza, ali se teže fokusiraju na formalne aspekte komunikacije, i zbog toga često nisu u stanju da validno izveštavaju o prisustvu ili odsustvu pojedinih gramatičkih obeležja. Zaključak:Rezultat

U našoj zemlji upadljiv je nedostatak validnih i standardizovanih psiholoških instrumenata, pogotovo u oblasti ranog jezičkog i komunikacionog razvoja dece. U ovom radu prikazujemo postupak i prve rezultate probne adaptacije za srpski jezik instrumenta koji je već adaptiran za različite jezike i u svetu se široko primenjuje – Mekartur-Bejtsovog inventara komunikacionog razvoja (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Thal, Bates, Hartung, Pethick, & Reilly, 2007). Instrument se sastoji od dva inventara za roditelje koji se primenjuju zavisno od uzrasta deteta. Prvi inventar Reči i gestovi (CDI I) predviđen je za uzraste od 8-18 meseci i sastavljen je od liste semantički kategorisanih reči i izraza koje dete razume i eventualno koristi, kao i indikatora ponašanja (akcija i gestova) koji ukazuju na razvoj simboličke funkcije i komunikacije. Drugi deo pod nazivom Reči i rečenice (CDI II) predviđen je za uzraste 16-30 meseci i sastoji se takođe od liste reči, ali i pokazatelja gramatičkog (morfološkog i sintaksičkog) razvoja. Planirana je adaptacija oba inventara (CDI I i CDI II) u dve verzije srpskog jezika, ekavskoj i ijekavskoj. Cilj: Istraživanje je imalo dva cilja: a. evaluaciju lingvističke validnosti originalnih stavki instrumenta za primenu na srpskom jeziku i njihovu adaptaciju u odnosu na morfo-sintaksičke specifičnosti i ustaljenu jezičku praksu, i b. evaluaciju razvojno-psihološke validnosti stavki i njihovu adaptaciju u odnosu na empirijske podatke o stvarnom jezičkom razvoju dece koja usvajaju srpski jezik. Metod: Evaluacija je urađena kroz tri postupka: a. selekcija i izmena originalnih engleskih stavki u skladu sa jezičkim specifičnostima srpskog jezika; b. pretraga Srpskog elektronskog korpusa ranog dečijeg govora (Anđelković, Ševa i Moskovljević, 2000) i provera pozicije pojedinačnih stavki u frekvencijskom rečniku dece; c. organizacija ekspertskih i roditeljskih fokus grupa u Beogradu i Banja Luci i procena stavki u odnosu na ustaljenu jezičku praksu. Rezultati: U oba, MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Invetories (CDIs) are designed for assessement of language and communicative development of children from early nonverbal communication, to early vocabulary and development of grammar. We present the preliminary results of the first pilot adaptation of CDI inventories (CDI I and CDI II) in Serbian language. The study was aimed at linguistic adaptation of the items for the use in Serbian language, and evaluation of developmental validity of items. The items were evaluated in relation to the real course of language and communicative development by means of two procedures: a. inspection of the Corpus of Early Serbian Child Language in defining the frequency of particular items, and b. organizing two kinds of focus groups (experts and parents) to discuss common verbal communication with children. The results indicated the questionable sections and items in CDIs inventories, and will be used for further adaptation and adjustment