Lexicon development in French-speaking infants

Abstract

This paper explores the early lexicon development of 548 monolingual French-speaking infants aged 8;0—16;0. Vocabulary acquisition was followed using the French adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development: Words and Gestures (Fenson et al., 1993). The results generally concur with those reported for other languages. There were striking individual variations in both terms of onset and rate of lexical growth. However, the total vocabulary scores increased steadily in all sections with chronological age. Girls showed superior scores in terms of labelling behaviours and lexical production. Nouns were predominant in both production and comprehension from 8 to 16 months regardless of the lexicon size. Predicates were the second most represented category, followed by function words. Both these categories increased with lexicon size. In the small lexicon, the most represented semantic categories were the same for comprehension and production: `games and routines', `people', `sound effects and animal sounds'. In the lexicon of more than 50 items, the percentages of `action words' became higher. A particularly strong association was found between total gestures and vocabulary comprehension.