By Katie Alcock, Lancaster University

How do children differ from each other? Why does one child say their first words at 8 months old, but another one might not manage to say anything until 10 months later? How different is children’s early vocabulary in different parts of the world and different parts of the same country? When do children learn to put words together into sentences and what does this have to do with the words they learn?

These are the kinds of questions parents across the UK are helping us answer. We are creating questionnaires for parents to fill in about the words, gestures, and sentences their children know.

We started our project in 2011 by asking parents of children aged 8 months through 18 months to tell us about the words their children could understand and say, and the gestures their children could use. This first phase of our project had 1200 parents from across the UK – all the regions of England, plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – tell us about how their children communicate.

Parents are the best people to tell us what their child knows, because they are with their child all the time, and we researchers in labs only see them if they come in for maybe an hour at a time. Children also tend to clam up when they see us (even though we try not to be scary!). Sometimes they completely refuse to cooperate – never work with children or animals, they say.

Before we started our project, if a speech therapist or a GP wanted to know what an English or Scottish child could say was typical for their age, they had two choices. They could spend a couple of hours with each child using a long and tiring assessment, or they could use parent questionnaires created in the US.

Obviously UK children are not the same as US children! But it’s not just words like “nappy” and “buggy” that are different. The way the questionnaires were created could have meant that UK parents were unnecessarily worried about their children’s speech and language. This was because the US parents tended to be a bit more optimistic in what they thought their child could say. A British child who didn’t measure up to that standard didn’t have anything wrong with them – they just had parents who were a bit more accurate.

We’re really pleased that the first phase of our project has finished. We published a book about our findings in 2020: the UK Communicative Development Inventories (Words and Gestures) otherwise known as UK-CDI (W&G).

From the book, speech therapists, GPs, researchers, and early years specialists can use our questionnaire to find out how many words a newly-communicating infant can say or understand. They can then look up where the child is on a growth curve of children of the same age. Parents know about these growth curves from their child’s red book – where children’s height and weight is plotted on a chart. Now we have growth curves for language and communication for younger babies – ages 8-18 months – throughout the UK.

We are now going ahead with the next phase: this time we need parents whose children are 16 to 30 months to take part.

We created our new questionnaire very much with UK dialects in mind. We already had data from labs throughout the UK but we noticed that some areas hadn’t been asked.

We asked parents from London, Birmingham, Wales and Scotland to tell us the words their children knew. We then made sure that we tested all the new words that we’d forgotten to include.

It’s really important for us to include all the different ways that children throughout the UK speak. Unlike the US, where parents can tick that their child says “mom” or “mommy”, we have “mum”, “mam”, “mummy”, “mom” and more on our questionnaire. We’re proud of our rich variety of dialect words here in the UK and we want to make sure our research reflects this.

We had read research from other countries showing that where younger babies see their family members more often, naturally they learn their granny or grandpa’s name earlier than in countries where the average grandparent lives a long way from their grandchildren. Italian children learn “nonna” earlier than American children learn “grandma”.

In the first 10 words that American children learn, these researchers were more likely to find “dog”, “ball” and “bottle”. But these weren’t in the first 10 words the Italian children learned. We worked out that we shouldn’t look at words from families who didn’t see their close relatives as often. If we did, then our toddlers whose grandparents were close might not know the same words – and might get a lower score.

To avoid this, we also made sure that families on higher and lower incomes were included, and we checked our data from different parts of the country too. We reasoned that if you were on a low income you might use grandparents or other relatives as childcare, to save money, and your children would know more words for relatives, even though they know the same number of words overall. We also reckoned that families in different parts of the country might know different words – bus if you are in London or cow if you are in a village.

All these ways are how we create a questionnaire for families that is representative of the whole of the UK. That’s where we need parent help, though: we can only do this with you. If you have a child that is growing up hearing English, and you live in the UK – please do sign up to take part!

The link is in the box, and if you have any questions, just email us on uk-cdi@lancaster.ac.uk.

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