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The precocious two-year-old: status of the lexicon and links to the grammar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2005

KARLA K. McGREGOR ,
LI SHENG  and
BRUCE SMITH
KARLA K. McGREGOR
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
LI SHENG
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
BRUCE SMITH
Affiliation:
University of Utah
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Abstract

This is a study of the lexical and grammatical abilities of 16 lexically precocious talkers. These children, aged 2;0 were compared to their age-matched peers, 22 typical talkers aged 2;0, and their expressive vocabulary-matched peers, 22 typical talkers aged 2;6. Individual differences in children's lexical knowledge at 2;0 were stable – evident in parent report, laboratory observation, and an experimental fast-mapping paradigm. In accordance with the continuity hypothesis, the lexically precocious children were also grammatically precocious, having a greater representation of grammatical types and tokens and more advanced combinatorial language than their typical age-matches. Their grammatical development was very similar to that of their older vocabulary-matched peers. Limits on continuity were highly constrained with no true dissociation between the lexicon and the grammar in 33 cases examined. We conclude that, among two-year-olds, grammatical development is more tightly associated with the size of the lexicon than with chronological age.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , August 2005 , pp. 563 - 585
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We express our gratitude to the families and children who participated as well as to Rosie Carr, Kanika So, Mitali Patel, and Robyn Newman for transcription, coding, and reliability analyses. Nina Capone, Evan Kidd, and Tom Klee provided helpful suggestions. The first author was supported by award R29 DC03698 from the National Institutes of Health during the data collection and analysis portion of this study and was kindly welcomed into Dorothy Bishop's laboratory during the writing of this article. Karla McGregor is currently affiliated with the University of Iowa.