Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T09:02:41.787Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Self-reported parental vocabulary input frequency for young children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2018

Dorthe BLESES ,
Werner VACH  and
Philip S. DALE
Dorthe BLESES
Affiliation:
TrygFonden's Centre for Child Research and School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark
Werner VACH
Affiliation:
University Hospital Basel, Switzerland
Philip S. DALE*
Affiliation:
Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences, University of New Mexico, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences, University of New Mexico, 1700 Lomas Blvd NE, Suite 1300, Albuquerque, NM 87131. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Vocabulary input frequency influences age of acquisition, and is also an essential control for investigating the influence of other factors. We propose a new method of frequency estimation, self-report. 918 Danish-speaking parents of 12–36-month-old children estimated their frequency of use of 725 words. Self-report was substantially correlated with both language sample based frequencies (0.67) and frequencies of a large written corpus of Danish (0.58). Correlations within vocabulary categories between frequency and age of acquisition, restricted to words occurring in the language samples, were comparable for the two estimates. Overall, self-report based frequency estimates appear to have a promising degree of validity, which reflects their greatest strength, independence of the situation.

Keywords

vocabularyinputparent
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 5 , September 2018 , pp. 1073 - 1090
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

We are grateful to the parents who provided the information about their children for this study. We also thank Rune Jørgenson of Southern Denmark University, who set up the online system for data collection, Ivan Iachine for data preparation, and Laila Kjaerbaek for assistance with the language samples. Access to datafiles and the web-administered questionnaire is available via the Open Science Framework at <http://osf.io/bjgct>.

References

Ambridge, B., Kidd, E., Rowland, C. P., & Theakston, A. L. (2015). The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 42, 239–73.Google Scholar
Asmussen, J. (2006). Towards a methodology for corpus-based studies of linguistic change: contrastive observations and their possible diachronic interpretations in the Korpus 2000 and Korpus 90 General Corpora of Danish. In Wilson, A., Archer, D., & Rayson, P (Eds.), Corpus linguistics around the world (pp. 33–48). Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Bates, E., Marchman, V., Thal, D., Fenson, L., Dale, P., Reznick, J. S. … Hartung, J. (1994). Developmental and stylistic variation in the composition of early vocabulary. Journal of Child Language, 21, 85–123.Google Scholar
Blackwell, A. A. (2005). Acquiring the English adjective lexicon: relationships with input properties and adjectival semantic typology. Journal of Child Language, 32, 535–62.Google Scholar
Bleses, D., Vach, W., Slott, M., Wehberg, S., Thomsen, P., Madsen, T. & Basbøll, H. (2008). The Danish Communicative Development Inventories: validity and main developmental trends. Journal of Child Language 35, 651–69.Google Scholar
Bloom, P. (2000). How children learn the meanings of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Braginsky, M., Yurovsky, D., Marchman, V. A., & Frank, M. C. (2016). From uh-oh to tomorrow: predicting age of acquisition for early words across languages. In Papafragou, A., Grodner, D., Mirman, D., & Trueswell, J. C. (Eds.), Proceeding of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Sciences, Society (pp. 1691–6). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1958). How shall a thing be called? Psychological Review, 65, 14–21.Google Scholar
Carey, S. (1978). The child as word learner. In Bresnan, J., Miller, G., & Halle, M. (Eds.), Linguistic theory and psychological reality (pp. 264–93). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences, 2nd ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Dale, P. S., Tosto, M. G., Hayiou-Thomas, M. E., & Plomin, R. (2015). Why does parental language input style predict child language development? A twin study of gene-environment correlation. Journal of Communication Disorders, 57, 106–17.Google Scholar
Eriksson, M., Marschik, P. B., Tulviste, T., Almgren, M., Perez Pereira, M. … Gallego, C. (2011). Differences between girls and boys and emerging language skills: evidence from 10 language communities. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30, 326–43.Google Scholar
Fenson, L., Marchman, V. A., Thal, D. J., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., & Bates, E. (2007). MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: user's guide and technical manual, 2nd ed. Baltimore. MD: Paul H. Brookes.Google Scholar
Goodman, J. C., Dale, P. S., & Li, P. (2008). Does frequency count? Parental input and the acquisition of vocabulary. Journal of Child Language, 35, 515–31.Google Scholar
Graham, S. A., San Juan, V., & Vukatana, E. (2015). The acquisition of words. In Bavin, E. L. & Naigles, L. R. (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of child language, 2nd ed. (pp. 369–87). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hoff, E. (2014). Language development, 5th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.Google Scholar
Höhle, B. (2015). Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization in early language acquisition. In Bavin, E. L. & Naigles, L. R. (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of child language, 2nd ed. (pp. 159–82). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Law, J., & Roy, P. (2008). Parental report of infant language skills: a review of the development and application of the communicative development inventories. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 13, 198–206.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: the database, Vol. 2. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Marchman, V. A., & Dale, P. S. (2018). Assessing receptive and expressive vocabulary in child language. In de Groot, A. M. B. & Hagoort, P. (Eds.), Research methods in psycholinguistics and the neurobiology of language: a practical guide (pp. 40–67). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Naigles, L. R., & Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1998). Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use. Journal of Child Language, 25, 95–120.Google Scholar
Pan, B. A., Rowe, M. L., Singer, J. D., & Snow, C. E. (2005). Maternal correlates of growth in toddler vocabulary production in low-income families. Child Development, 76, 763–82.Google Scholar
Plunkett, K. (1986). Learning strategies in two Danish children's language development. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 27, 64–73.Google Scholar
Ridgeway, D., Waters, E., & Kuczaj, S. A. (1985). Acquisition of emotion-descriptive language: receptive and productive vocabulary norms for ages 18 months to 6 years. Developmental Psychology, 21, 901–8.Google Scholar
Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M., & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8, 382–439.Google Scholar
Roy, B. C., Frank, M. C., DeCamp, P., Miller, M., & Roy, D. (2015). Predicting the birth of a spoken word. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112, 12663–8.Google Scholar
Tan, S. H., & Schafer, G. (2005). Toddlers’ novel word learning: effects of phonological representation, vocabulary size, and parents’ ostensive behavior. First Language, 25, 131–55.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: a usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M., & Merriman, W. E. (1995). Beyond names for things: young children's acquisition of verbs. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Zauche, L. H., Thul, T. A., Darcy Mahoney, A. E., & Stapel-Wax, J. L. (2016). Influence of language nutrition on children's language and cognitive development: an integrated review. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 36, 318–33.Google Scholar