Temperamental profiles and language development: a replication and an extension

Individual differences in child temperament are associated with individual differences in language development. The present study examined the relationship between tempera- ment and language ability in 109 twenty-four- to 30-month-old children. Parents and day-care teachers completed two questionnaires: the Primo Vocabolario del Bambino (Caselli & Casadio, 1995) and the Questionari Italiani del Temperamento (Axia, 2002). Researchers administered the First Language Test (Axia, 1993) to assess productive and receptive lan- guage in each child. Replicating previous research (Usai, Garello, & Viterbori, 2009), day-care teachers iden- tified three temperamental profiles: most of the children fit into the first profile, typical of the Italian population; another profile was made up of easily distractible and not very persistent children, with a poor capacity to modulate motor activity; and the third profile of children were inhibited in new situations. A relationship was found between temperament assessed by day-care teachers and different levels of linguistic competence. In particular, the groups of “inattentive” and “inhibited” children showed poorer lexical and morpho- logical abilities and a more immature vocabulary, characterised by the presence of more primitive components of the lexical repertory compared to the group of “typical” chil- dren. Unlike the results from day-care teachers, temperament questionnaires completed by parents revealed a 4-cluster-solution. Also, for parents, the “typical” profile is charac- terised by the largest vocabulary (productive and receptive) and the most mature semantic production.