A critical question in the study of language development is to understand lexical and syntactic acquisition, which play different roles in speech to the extent it would be natural to surmise they are acquired differently. As measured through the comprehension and production of closed-class words, syntactic ability emerges at roughly the 400-word mark. However, a significant proportion of the developmental work uses a coarse combination of function and content words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI). Using the MB-CDI Wordbank database, we implemented a factor analytic approach to distinguish between lexical and syntactic development from the Words and Sentences (WS) form that involves both function words and the explicit categorizations. Although the Words and Gestures (WG) form did not share the factor structure, common WG/WS elements recapitulate the expected age-related changes. This parsing of the MB-CDI may prove simple, yet fruitful in subsequent investigation.

语言发展研究中的一个关键问题是理解词汇和句法习得，它们在言语中扮演不同的角色，以至于很自然地推测它们的习得方式不同。通过对封闭类单词的理解和产生来衡量，句法能力出现在大约 400 个单词的标记处。然而，在 MacArthur-Bates 交际发展量表 (MB-CDI) 中，很大一部分发展性工作使用功能词和实义词的粗略组合。使用 MB-CDI Wordbank 数据库，我们实施了一种因素分析方法，以区分词汇和句法发展与涉及功能词和显式分类的词句 (WS) 形式。虽然 Words and Gestures (WG) 形式没有共享因子结构，常见的 WG/WS 元素概括了预期的与年龄相关的变化。MB-CDI 的这种解析可能很简单，但在随后的调查中很有成效。