Chapter 6 Input and the acquisition of vocabulary: Examining the parental lexicon

Abstract

Publisher Summary The chapter provides a sociocognitive perspective on the acquisition of vocabulary by young children. Three facets of the lexicon are under consideration. First, the chapter examines the core vocabulary, the most common words in the language, words that are provided by all parents and learned by all children. Next, it moves to two delimited domains, the lexicon of basic color words, and the lexicon of monetary terms. Two data sets are used from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), the Gleason Corpus, and the New England Sample, to consider the relation between parents' input language and children's acquisition of a core vocabulary, as well as acquisition of specific color and monetary terms. The findings suggest that, although children universally possess cognitive propensities that predict the order of acquisition of vocabulary, adults' language to children reflects and accentuates a similar hierarchy. Examination of the input vocabulary shows that the emphasis and elaboration provided by adults within a given domain varies with the cultural importance of the domain.