Abstract
AbstractPrevious research on the effects of word-level factors on lexical acquisition has shown that frequency and concreteness are most important. Here, we investigate CDI data from 1,030 Dutch children, collected with the short form of the Dutch CDI, to address (i) how word-level factors predict lexical acquisition, once child-level factors are controlled, (ii) whether effects of these word-level factors vary with word class and age, and (iii) whether any interactions with age are due to differences in receptive vocabulary. Mixed-effects regressions yielded effects of frequency and concreteness, but not of word class and phonological factors (e.g., word length, neighborhood density). The effect of frequency was stronger for nouns than predicates. The effects of frequency and concreteness decreased with age, and were not explained by differences in vocabulary knowledge. These findings extend earlier results to Dutch, and indicate that effects of age are not due to increases in vocabulary knowledge.
Highlights
Previous studies on the factors that contribute to early lexical acquisition indicate that children acquire frequent and concrete words before infrequent and abstract words (Bates, Dale & Thal, 1995; Braginsky, Yurovsky, Marchman & Frank, 2019; Hansen, 2017), and phonologically simple words before more complex ones (Storkel, 2004; Vihman & Croft, 2007)
The current study In this study, we examine how word frequency, concreteness and phonological factors relate to early lexical acquisition in Dutch, taking into account inter-individual differences in age, gender, and parental education
A moderate to high negative correlation was found between word length and neighborhood density, indicating that shorter words generally had more neighbors than longer words (r(64) = -.63, p < .001)
Summary
Previous studies on the factors that contribute to early lexical acquisition indicate that children acquire frequent and concrete words before infrequent and abstract words (Bates, Dale & Thal, 1995; Braginsky, Yurovsky, Marchman & Frank, 2019; Hansen, 2017), and phonologically simple words before more complex ones (Storkel, 2004; Vihman & Croft, 2007). Few studies to date have taken such a multi-factor approach Storkel, 2009; Swingley & Humphrey, 2018) In this earlier work, acquisition data were pooled across children, which leaves unaddressed whether differences between individual children in age, gender, and family background impacted on the outcomes. By including word-level factors, and child-level factors (i.e., age, gender, parental education), we assess the relative contributions of word-level factors, once variation at the child level is controlled. We assess whether the effects of the word-level factors interact with age, and if so, whether these interactions can be attributed to increases in children’s vocabulary knowledge
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