Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The McArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI, Fenson et al., 2007), is a parent-report vocabulary checklist and gold standard measure of early language that has been widely used in English-speaking contexts and adapted into over 80 languages. CDIs have been extensively developed and researched in English, Mandarin, and Spanish (the first, second, and fourth most spoken languages), but there is very little work on Hindi, the world's third-largest language. There are multiple adaptations of the CDI to Hindi, but none are publicly available, and there is no published work assessing these instruments or describing CDI data from Hindi-speaking children. We compiled three existing adaptations of the Hindi CDI wordlist and developed novel grammatical items. We are collecting data (current n=138) on this vocabulary superset (961 items) with three goals: to propose a single full-length Hindi CDI, assess its reliability and validity, and make our form and data publicly available.