Les premiers mots de l’enfant libanais en contexte plurilingue : que nous apprend l’utilisation d’un compte rendu parental trilingue ?

Vocabulary is an extremely important indicator of language development. In Lebanon, a multilingual
country, speech therapists still lack to this day the necessary tools, adapted and calibrated, to bilingual
children aged less than 3 years old. For this reason, a project was launched in order to adapt the long
version of the parental questionnaire « MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories:
words and gestures » or CDI-I (Fenson et al., 1993) in three languages (Arabic, French and English).
In this study, the vocabulary of 112 bilingual Lebanese children aged 8 to 16 months was analyzed.
No statistically significant differences in word numbers were found between girls and boys in comprehension
and in production. In addition, child’s birth order did not seem to affect vocabulary growth.
Furthermore, the analysis showed that the category “social words” is the most developed at this age
(8 to 16 months) in comprehension and production. Finally, the analysis of vocabulary confirmed that
language exposure plays an important role for the development of lexicons in different languages.