CDI construction - what to put in

[Alcock, Katherine]

We're constructing a CDI in two East African languages which both have a lot of grammatical words.  For example, I have just counted up the possessives and there are about 60 in one of the languages and more in the other.

In English it seems as if all pronouns etc. are put in to the toddler scale - what about in more grammar-rich languages? Would it be sensible to pilot all the words and then leave in some that distinguish well? Or to ask parents about some of the words and to give examples of the others their children can say? We are administering the inventory as an interview as our parents are illiterate so the parents are a captive audience - they can't go off to pick the kids up in the middle of doing the questionnaire, and then forget about filling it in - but it takes longer.

Secondly, and I have a feeling this was discussed recently, what exactly constitutes a word? Common phrases are included in the English version, and it seems to me they are often combinations of other pairs of words.  Presumably we are assuming that children have not analysed the phrases into their separate words - is there evidence that children use the phrases (e.g. peanut butter) without their consituent words (peanut, butter) and hence it adds information to include the phrases?  There seem to be fewer phrases in the short forms of the questionnaire, and I'm not sure if this is deliberate.

thanks

Katie Alcock