Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Early language skill is predictive of later life outcomes, and is thus of great interest to developmental psychologists and clinicians. The Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs), parent-reported inventories of early-learned vocabulary items, have proven to be valid and reliable instruments for measuring children's early language skill. CDIs have been painstakingly adapted to dozens of languages, and cross-linguistic comparisons thus far show both consistency and variability in language acquisition trajectories. However, thousands of languages do not yet have CDIs, posing a significant barrier to increasing the diversity of languages that are studied. Here, we propose a method for selecting candidate words to include on new CDIs, leveraging analysis of psychometric properties of translation-equivalent concepts that are frequently included on existing CDIs. Leveraging 26 datasets from existing CDIs, we propose a list of 229 concepts that have low variability in their cross-linguistic learning difficulty. This pool of common concepts---analogous to the "Swadesh" lists used in glottochronology---can be used as a starting point for future CDI adaptations. We test how well the proposed list generalizes to data from 8 additional languages.