The impact of child-directed language on children’s lexical development

Abstract

This study investigated (1) whether and how English caregivers adjust their speech (i.e., mean length of utterances, lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, sentence types, and deixis) according to different contexts, children’s knowledge, and age, and (2) which aspects of parental speech input predict children’s immediate learning of novel words as well as their vocabulary size. We studied a semi-naturalistic corpus, in which English caregivers talked to their children (3-4 years old) about toys that were present or absent, and known or unknown to the children. We found that caregivers flexibly adjusted various aspects of their speech to maintain an informative and engaging learning environment. Furthermore, we found that rich lexicon and yes-no questions predict better immediate word learning, whereas caregivers' lexical diversity, lexical frequency, the use of Yes-No questions are related to children’s general vocabulary size. In conclusion, higher quality of caregivers’ language predicts better immediate word learning and vocabulary size.