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INTRODUCTION
Even though Denmark has fostered notable and internationally recognized linguists, including such famous personalities as Rasmus Rask (1787-1832), Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) and Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965), research in child language acquisition in Denmark has been rather scattered up until recently and only relatively few studies on Danish children's early language acquisition have been carried out.
Otto Jespersen, in his 1916 book Nutidssprog hos börn og voxne [Modern language in children and adults], was in fact the first to publish empirical language data from Danish children based on a diary study. With the exception of a few studies in the 1970s it was not until the late 1980s/early 1990s that research in Danish children's language acquisition got off the ground, mostly as cross-linguistic ventures. Especially research on early lexical development in Danish children has been very limited. To our knowledge, a total of only two studies has been published (cf. Brink, 1979; Plunkett, 1993), and until now no study has been carried out which has investigated the inter-individual variability in Danish children's early lexical development and which has established normative growth curves. Consequently, the question of how Danish children's early vocabulary development compares to children acquiring other languages has not been addressed.
Therefore, a large-scale cross-sectional study of Danish children's early language acquisition in the age range of 0 ; 8 to 3 ; 0 is the first to document the acquisition of early linguistic milestones in Danish children. The study is based on the Danish adaptation of the American CDI-instruments (The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, cf. Fenson, Marchman, Thal, Dale, Reznick & Bates, 2007). The Danish CDI-study is presented in Bleses et al. (in press; see also Bleses, Vach, Wehberg, Faber & Madsen, 2007). The main objective of this paper is therefore - based on data from the Danish study - to describe the trajectory of Danish children's early lexical development, as indexed by the CDI-parental reports, relative to other languages, by comparing the Danish study to all comparable CDI-studies in order to identify similarities and differences. The CDI-instrument (which consists of the two CDI-reports CDI: Words and Gestures and CDI: Words and Sentences; cf. Fenson et al., 2007) has not only been proven...