Early lexical and morphosyntactic development in children with perinatal brain injury acquiring Croatian

The aim of this paper is to analyse early lexical and morphosyntactic development in children with perinatal brain injury acquiring Croatian. Subjects were seven monolingual children who suffered early brain injury and were selected when they started producing first word combinations and had an expressive vocabulary in a range from 50 to 200 words. A combination of parent-reports, samples of spontaneous speech and a standardized language test was used. The results were interpreted within the framework of data on language development in children with early brain injury, but also within the framework of acquiring a morphologically highly inflected language. Four of the seven subjects show delayed language expression and dissociation between language comprehension and expression. However, all subjects very early on began to use grammatical morphemes. Furthermore, an interrelation between the morphosyntactic compexity of a child's utterances and mother-child interaction patterns was found.