Communicative development of Portuguese infants aged between 8 and 15 months

Abstract The main aim of this study was to investigate the development of gesture and language acquisition in European Portuguese infants. These were assessed using the European Portuguese MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: words and gestures. The parents’ reports of gestures and lexical competence of 1314 children, aged between 8 and 15 months, were collected. As expected, the results indicated that word comprehension, word production, and the use of gestures increased with age. A main gender effect was found for total gestures, with girls obtaining higher scores than boys, but the effect size was small. No differences were found between girls and boys for word comprehension, word production, and phrases understood. All lexical and gesture measurements were positively correlated, even after controlling for age and gender effects. These findings are discussed in terms of their consistency with those obtained for other languages.