Children's Lexicons Research Articles

أثر السماع والقياس في إثراء المعجم اللغوي للطفل

يعدُّ الكلام أبرز مظاهر تطور البشر وتفوقه على سائر مخلوقات الأرض، ولكي ينتج الكلام لابد من وجود اللغة التي تشتمل على عدد كبير من الرموز اللغوية، والتي تحتاج إلى علاقات ائتلافية معقدة ومتنوعة لا يتقنها إلا بنو البشر. وحتى يستطيع الإنسان التواصل مع غيره عليه أن يجمع ثروة من الكلمات ويخزنها في ذاكرته، وقد هيأ الله سبحانه وتعالى للإنسان وسائل تعينه على جمعها، ومن أبرز هذه الوسائل: السّماع والقياس. ولمّا كان السّمع أول الحواس التي يعتمد عليها الطفل للتواصل مع محيطه اللغوي واكتساب لغة قومه اكتسب السماع أهمية كبيرة تفوق القياس في إثرائه لمعجم الإنسان اللغوي، غير أنَّ ذلك لا يقلل من أهمية القياس؛ فمن المستحيل أن يسمع الإنسان كل صيغ اللغة وأساليبها المتنوعة.

Cross-linguistic influence in the simultaneous bilingual child's lexicon: An eye-tracking and primed picture selection study

AbstractIn a between-language lexical priming study, we examined to what extent the two languages in a simultaneous bilingual child's lexicon interact, while taking individual differences in language exposure into account. Primary-school-aged Dutch–Greek bilinguals performed a primed picture selection task combined with eye-tracking. They matched pictures to auditorily presented Dutch target words preceded by Greek prime words. Their reaction times and eye movements were recorded. We tested for effects of between-language phonological priming, translation priming, and phonological priming through translation. Priming effects emerged in reaction times and eye movements in all three conditions, at different stages of processing, and unaffected by language exposure. These results extend previous findings for bilingual toddlers and bilingual adults. Processing similarities between these populations indicate that, across different stages of development, bilinguals have an integrated lexicon that is accessed in a language-nonselective way and is susceptible to interactions within and between different types of lexical representation.

Parental reports on the lexicon of children from diverse bilingual populations.

Parental questionnaires have been widely used to assess children's vocabularies. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories (MB-CDI) have been adapted into over 100 languages, providing researchers with access to various languages. As the vocabularies of bilingual children are distributed across their two languages, language knowledge must be assessed in both languages. While this can be done with two questionnaires, one for each language, the present study makes use of a multicultural adaptation of the MB-CDI, within a single questionnaire, that was geared specifically for bilingual context. In order to explore the developmental trajectories of the vocabularies of 90 bilingual children from diverse linguistic populations (English-Hebrew (n = 30), French-Hebrew (n = 30), and Russian-Hebrew (n = 30) speaking families) parents reported on both the Home Language (HL) and the Societal Language-Hebrew (SL-Hebrew). Parents also provided background information about the child, the child's family, and exposure to each language. Our findings show no significant difference between vocabulary size of children from diverse bilingual populations in the HL and the SL, for both production and comprehension. Moreover, children from all three groups demonstrate balanced bilingualism at the group level. Correlations were found between both exposure to and use of each language by children, and various vocabulary measures across the three groups. The similar vocabulary levels demonstrated by the three groups as well as the balanced bilingualism can be explained by the relatively high prestige of all languages tested. Exposure to each language shows support in that language and a negative effect on the other language, demonstrating the crucial role exposure plays in bilingual children's language performance.

Word usage as measured by parental checklists and language samples: trends, comparisons, and implications.

Although parental checklists are well-known for their potential in indexing young children's lexicon size, they can also be used to track children's acquisition of individual words. Word-level data can be used to identify the checklist words most and least commonly employed across groups of children. Like parent-completed vocabulary checklists, samples of spontaneous language use collected from multiple children can also generate measures of word commonality, concerned with the numbers of children producing individual words. To our knowledge, comparisons of word usage as determined by parental checklist and language sample data obtained in parallel from the same children have not been carried out. Also scarce in the empirical literature are item-level analyses of early bilingual lexicons that explore word usage across two emerging languages. The present study aimed to contribute toward bridging both gaps through the analysis of data generated by a bilingual Maltese-English adaptation of the vocabulary checklist of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Sentences (CDI: WS) and spontaneous language samples for the same children. An additional objective was to derive implications for revising the current version of the vocabulary checklist, in preparation for its eventual standardization. For 44 Maltese children aged 12, 18, 24, and 30 months, the words reported by their main caregivers on the vocabulary checklist were identified, along with their respective semantic categories. For the same children, 20-min language samples obtained during free play with the caregiver were transcribed orthographically. Words identified through parental report and language sampling were analyzed for commonality, i.e., the number of children producing each word. Comparison of the word usage patterns obtained through both methods indicated differences in the words most commonly sampled and those most commonly reported, particularly in relation to grammatical categories. Notwithstanding these differences, positive and significant correlations emerged when considering all grammatical categories and languages across commonality levels. The commonality scores based on parental checklist data have implications for reconsidering the length and language balance of the Maltese-English adaptation of the CDI: WS vocabulary checklist. Sampled word usage patterns can contribute additional objectivity in updating the reporting instrument in preparation for its eventual standardization.

Effectiveness of a group intervention for lexical enrichment in 6-to-10-year-old children with developmental language disorder

Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have a vocabulary deficit. One of the most effective interventions for increasing children's lexicon size is the semantic and phonological approach, an approach that has been used mainly with adolescents. The goals of our study are (1) to test whether the semantic-phonological approach coupled with rich vocabulary instruction is effective with younger children with DLD on words learned during the training and (2) to check whether the gains can be maintained over the long term. A group of eight French-speaking children (aged 6 to 10), with a diagnosis of DLD, underwent a phonological-semantic group intervention over 5 months. Four lists (vegetables, animals, school materials, and sports) of words were trained, each category involving 3-hour sessions. Five-word lists (L1, L2, L3, L4, and L5) corresponded to the four trained categories and one served as control. When L1 words were trained, L2 served as the control list; then when L2 words were trained, L3 was the control list, and so on. The group results indicated significant improvement on the four trained lists once intervention was introduced, and no improvement on the control lists. All effects were maintained over the long term at the delayed posttest. Individual outcomes were dependent on children's cognitive and language profiles. Vocabulary training thus allowed young French-speaking children with DLD to enrich their vocabulary on specific measures. The implications of the results are discussed at the group and individual level.

CCLOOW: Chinese children's lexicon of oral words.

In this article, we introduce the Chinese Children's Lexicon of Oral Words (CCLOOW), the first lexical database based on animated movies and TV series for 3-to-9-year-old Chinese children. The database computes from 2.7 million character tokens and 1.8 million word tokens. It contains 3920 unique character and 22,229 word types. CCLOOW reports frequency and contextual diversity metrics of the characters and words, as well as length and syntactic categories of the words. CCLOOW frequency and contextual diversity measures correlated well with other Chinese lexical databases, particularly well with that computed from children's books. The predictive validity of CCLOOW measures were confirmed with Grade 2 children's naming and lexical decision experiments. Further, we found that CCLOOW frequencies could explain a considerable proportion in adults' written word recognition, indicating that early language experience might have lasting impacts on the mature lexicon. CCLOOW provides validated frequency and contextual diversity estimates that complements current children's lexical database based on written language samples. It is freely accessible online at https://www.learn2read.cn/ccloow .

Acquiring religious words: dialogical and individual construction of a word's meaning.

By the age of eight, there is a significant increase in abstract words in the child's lexicon. A crucial contribution can be seen in the linguistic input, i.e. the way how abstract words are presented by caregivers by means of linguistic perspectivation and emotionalization. Following an interactionist way, we were interested in how the semantics of abstract words is constructed by child and caregiver in duet. We focused on a subset of abstract words and studied the acquisition of meaning of the religious concept mercy. We expected religious words to be emotionally anchored and presented with perspectivation, both contributing to learning. Exploring the dialogic constructions, we investigated eight 7- to 8-year olds and their parents during dialogic reading and studied their strategies focusing on the linguistic means of emotionalization and perspectivation in contextualizing the word. In a subsequent test, we analysed these means used by the children and assessed their individual understanding of mercy. Our analyses indicate that during reading, the enrichment of semantics by emotionalization was related between child and caregiver, whereas cross-situationally, a simultaneous enrichment of emotionalization and perspectivation was present. Moreover, the children demonstrated a conceptual understanding of mercy in religious contexts, but not in secular contexts. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Predicting Scalar Implicature Interpretations From Lexical Knowledge.

We measure typically developing monolingual child Spanish speakers' lexical development with a range of standard expressive and receptive tests. We also measure their comprehension of sentences with the existential quantifier algunos "some" to determine their abilities to generate "some, but not all" scalar implicatures or pragmatically enriched quantifier interpretations. We then determine the degree to which lexical development predicts implicature interpretations. We fit regression models with lexical measures as predictor variables and implicature interpretations as the outcome variable. We then divide the child sample into implicature generators (50/61) and implicature nongenerators (11/61) and test the usefulness of the four lexical measures in a linear discriminant function analysis to separate children into these two categories. Results show significant correlations between each lexical measure and the outcome variable and, in a regression, that three of four lexical measures account for unique variance. Furthermore, the linear discriminant function analysis separates children into implicature nongenerators with 100% accuracy (11/11) and implicature generators with 88% accuracy (44/50). The Quantity Scale, or set of quantity-expressing determiners, proposed by Horn and Grice, develops as a function of the links among its quantifiers. We speculate that children's lexicons refract approximate number system representations in language- and morpheme-specific ways. These quantified noun phrases (NPs) are then merged into sentences interpreted pragmatically with conversationally computed implicatures, using higher order reasoning.

CCLOWW: A grade-level Chinese children's lexicon of written words.

In this article, we present the Chinese Children's Lexicon of Written Words (CCLOWW), the first grade-level database that provides frequency statistics of simplified Chinese characters and words for children. The database computes from a corpus of 34,671,424 character tokens and 22,427,010 word tokens (including single- and multicharacter words), extracted from 2131 books. It contains 6746 different character types and 153,079 different word types. CCLOWW provides several frequency indices of simplified Chinese for three grade levels (grade 2 and below, grades 3-4, grades 5-6) to profile children's experience with written Chinese in and outside of school. We describe in this article the distributions of frequency and contextual diversity of the characters and words, as well as word length and syntactic categories of the words in the corpus and the subcorpora. We also report results of correlation analyses with other written corpora and of several naming and lexicon decision experiments. The findings suggest that CCLOWW frequency measures correlate well with other corpora. Importantly, they could reliably predict children's and adults' naming and lexical decision performances. They could also explain variance in adults' visual word recognition, in addition to frequency measures computed in an adult corpus, indicating that early print exposure might influence readers' lexical processing later on beyond an age of acquisition effect. CCLOWW will help researchers in language processing and development as well as educators with selecting language materials appropriate for children's developmental stages. The database is freely available online at https://www.learn2read.cn/database/ .

Onset Neighborhood Density Slows Lexical Access in High Vocabulary 30-Month Olds.

There is consensus that the adult lexicon exhibits lexical competition. In particular, substantial evidence demonstrates that words with more phonologically similar neighbors are recognized less efficiently than words with fewer neighbors. How and when these effects emerge in the child's lexicon is less clear. In the current paper, we build on previous research by testing whether phonological onset density slows lexical access in a large sample of 100 English-acquiring 30-month-olds. The children participated in a visual world looking-while-listening task, in which their attention was directed to one of two objects on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded. We found moderate evidence of inhibitory effects of onset neighborhood density on lexical access and clear evidence for an interaction between onset neighborhood density and vocabulary, with larger effects of onset neighborhood density for children with larger vocabularies. Results suggest the lexicons of 30-month-olds exhibit lexical-level competition, with competition increasing with vocabulary size.

МАКАРТУРОВСКИЙ ОПРОСНИК КАК ИНСТРУМЕНТ ДИАГНОСТИКИ ЛЕКСИКОНА ДЕТЕЙ-БИЛИНГВОВ

The article analyzes the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) as a means of research and diagnostics of children's speech in different languages. It takes into account the data from Stanford University websites, which deal with findings resulted from the analysis of completed questionnaires. The sites provide abundant information concerning adaptations of this tool for more than 100 languages and a database of children's passive and active lexicons for 29 languages (including Russian). Moreover, on the basis of 23 languages, they show unique and universal character of word usage in the speech of young learners studying several different languages simultaneously. This article also provides research findings on the bilingual children’s early vocabulary (with Russian as the Heritage language) under the RFBR grant No. 19-012-00293.

Facilitating Effect of Grapheme and Syllable Cues on the Writing Performance of Children with Chinese Dictation Difficulties

Spelling difficulties is referred to as dictation difficulties in China. The visual-auditory binding deficit hypothesis suggested that Chinese dictation difficulties can be correlated with deficits in binding visual and auditory information. However, how Chinese characters are mentally represented in children with dictation difficulties remained unexplored. In this study, 20 children with dictation difficulties and 18 chronically age-matched controls completed dictation tasks using grapheme cues, syllable cues, and grapheme-syllable cues. Dictation accuracy was recorded. Findings showed that under the grapheme cue condition, dictation accuracy between the two groups did not differ significantly; under the grapheme-syllable and the syllable condition, dictation accuracy in children with dictation difficulties was significantly lower compared to controls. These findings supported that the graphemic and phonological representations of Chinese characters might loosely associated in the mental lexicon of children with dictation difficulties. Intervention strategies should take into account improving their ability to associate graphemes and syllables of Chinese characters.

The Relationship Between Lexical and Phonological Development in French-Speaking Children: A Longitudinal Study.

Purpose This study examines the influence of lexical and phonological factors on expressive lexicon size in 40 French-speaking children tested longitudinally from 22 to 48 months. The factors include those based on the lexical and phonological properties of words in the children's lexicons (phonetic complexity, word length, neighborhood density [ND], and word frequency [WF]) as well as variables measuring phonological production (percent consonants correct and phonetic inventory size). Specifically, we investigate the relative influence of these factors at individual ages, namely, 22, 29, 36, and 48 months, and which factors measured at 22 and 29 months influence lexicon size at 36 and 48 months. Method Children were selected based on parent-reported vocabulary size. We included children with low, medium, and high vocabulary scores. The children's lexicons were coded in terms of phonetic complexity, word length, ND, and WF, and their phonological production skills were based on measures of percent consonants correct and phonetic inventory size extracted from spontaneous speech samples at 29, 36, and 48 months. In the case of ND and WF, we focused on one- and two-syllable nouns. Results Across the age range, the most important factor that explained variance in lexicon size was the WF of nouns. Children who selected low-frequency nouns had larger vocabularies across all ages (22-48 months). The WF of two-syllable nouns and phonological production measured at 29 months influenced lexicon size at 36 months, whereas the WF (of one- and two-syllable words) influenced lexicon size at 48 months. Conclusions The findings support the role of WF and phonological production in explaining expressive vocabulary development. Children enlarge their vocabularies by adding nouns of increasingly lower frequency. Phonological production plays a role in accounting for vocabulary size up until the age of 36 months. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12291074.

Early lexical acquisition in the Wichi language.

This research brings new evidence on early lexical acquisition in Wichi, an under-studied indigenous language in which verbs occupy a privileged position in the input and in conjunction with nouns are characterized by a complex and rich morphology. Focusing on infants ranging from one- to three-year-olds, we analyzed the parental report of infants' vocabulary (Study 1) and naturalistic speech samples of children and their caregivers (Study 2). Results reveal that: (1) although verbs predominate in the linguistic input, children's lexicons favor nouns over verbs; (2) children's early noun-advantage decreases, coming into closer alignment with the patterns in the linguistic input at a MLU of 1.5; and (3) this early transition is temporally related to children's increasing productive command over the grammatical categories that characterize the morphology of both nouns and verbs. These findings emphasize the early effects of language-specific properties of the input, broadening the vantage point from which to view the lexical acquisition process.

Children's Lyric Poetry: An Analysis of Child and the Sea by Salim Abdulqader

This study aimed to identify lyrical poetry directed to children, specifying its concept, types, and characteristics. To achieve this objective, a critical analysis of a children lyrical poem written by Salim Abdulqader was conducted. The study followed the descriptive method which is based on analysis and deduction of lyrical poems addressed to children. Major findings revealed that successful child lyrical poetry is characterized by a childlike spirit which is concerned with the child's issues, worlds, and needs without intercalating the worlds of adults and their topics; it also includes some educational aspects without resorting to direct guidance. Moreover, in his song Child and the Sea, Salim Abdulqader was able to provide a successful sample of poetic discourse directed to children according to its balanced characteristics which are required in the structure of a poetic text. Such poetry meets children's needs and achieves its aesthetic, knowledge and education objectives. It is written in a language that develops children's linguistic and cognitive lexicon and provides them with many educational values which are part of pure Islamic teachings. 
 Keywords: children's poetry, Child and the Sea, Salim Abdulqader.

Children's scale errors: A by-product of lexical development?

Scale errors occur when young children seriously attempt to perform an action on an object which is impossible due to its size. Children vary substantially in the incidence of scale errors with many factors potentially contributing to these differences, such as age and the type of scale errors. In particular, the evidence for an inverted U-shaped curve of scale errors involving the child's body (i.e., body scale errors), which would point to a developmental stage, is mixed. Here we re-examine how body scale errors vary with age and explore the possibility that these errors would be related to the size and properties of children's lexicon. A large sample of children aged 18-30months (N=125) was tested in a scale error elicitation situation. Additionally, parental questionnaires were collected to assess children's receptive and expressive lexicon. Our key findings are that scale errors linearly decrease with age in childhood, and are more likely to be found in early talkers rather than in less advanced ones. This suggests that scale errors do not correspond to a developmental stage, and that one determinant of these errors is the speed of development of the linguistic and conceptual system, as a potential explanation for the individual variability in prevalence.

Development of Visual Analysis and Orthographic Input Lexicon in Children with Developmental Dyslexia

Development of Visual Analysis and Orthographic Input Lexicon in Children with Developmental Dyslexia

The Effect of Word Frequency on Phonemic Accuracy in Children With Cochlear Implants and Peers With Typical Levels of Hearing.

The frequency of occurrence of words and sounds has a pervasive influence on typically developing children's language acquisition. For instance, highly frequent words appear earliest in a child's lexicon, and highly frequent phonemes are produced more accurately. This study evaluates (a) whether word frequency influences word accuracy and (b) whether this is also the case for children with a history of auditory deprivation. More specifically, the influence of word frequency on phonemic accuracy is examined in deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI), and compared to age-matched children with typical hearing, between word onset and age 7. Results show that highly frequent words are produced more accurately, except for words in the highest frequency regions (i.e., predominantly closed-class words). This effect is more pronounced in children with typical hearing when compared with children with CI. Thus, children with CI are sensitive to word frequency, but to a lesser extent than peers with typical hearing.

The Relationship between Premature Birth and the Size of Expressive Lexicon in18-36-month-old Children

Introduction: The acquisition of speech and language constitutes a dynamic part of two-year-old children’s growth. Expressive lexicon is a key indicator of language ability in these children. Premature birth, birth before gestational week 37, is one of the most common risk factors associated with learning skill development. A review of literature suggests inconsistent results on the relationship between preterm birth and the size of expressive lexicon in children. Objective: The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between preterm birth and the size of expressive Lexicon in 18-36-month-old Persian-speaking children. Materials and Methods: The present controlled analytical cross-sectional study recruited 18-36-month-old children presenting to 17 Shahrivar Hospital in Rasht, Iran. The study children were divided into the term and preterm groups. Before beginning the sampling, the children were assigned to three age groups of 13 each, including 18-24 months, 24-30 months and 30-36 months. The data collection tools comprised the 688-itemMacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI, form II), which was completed by the parents. Moreover, all the words were divided into four groups of social terms, common nouns, grammatical words and predicates, and the scores obtained for each category were compared among the groups. The data obtained were assessed using descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation, and analytical t-test. P<0.05 was set as the level of statistical significance. Results: The overall mean size of expressive lexicon was found to be 352.48 ± 177.11in the term children and 240.28 ± 135.93 in preterm ones, suggesting significant differences between the two groups (P=0.002). Significant differences were also observed between the term and preterm 18-36-month-old children in terms of common nouns as a dimension of the tool (P=0.01). Conclusion: Parents seem to play a key role in reducing preterm-birth associated lexicon differences at higher age by teaching their children.

Lexical diversity in narrative discourse of children with specific language impairment

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit significant difficulties in acquiring, processing and using new words. Analysis of spontaneous speech is a useful tool in assessing the development and use of the lexicon in children with SLI. Measures of lexical diversity are commonly used methods in the evaluation of lexical efficiency in spontaneous speech. The aim of this study was to evaluate the differences in overall lexical diversity and semantic words diversity between children with SLI and typically developing children. The sample consisted of 115 children between five and eight years of age, divided into two groups, 60 children diagnosed with SLI and 55 typically developing children. A sample of spontaneous speech was obtained through the task of story retelling. Fairy tale 'Cinderella' was used as a stimulus task. Lexical diversity and semantic words diversity were calculated with Type Token Ratio (TTR - Chotlos, 1944; Templin, 1957). The results showed that children with SLI had significantly lower score of lexical diversity in spontaneous speech compared with typically developing children. Difficulties with lexical diversity in children with SLI were found in both, overall lexical diversity (p≤0.00) and semantic words diversity (p≤0.00). Also, difficulties with lexical diversity in children with SLI, comparing with typically developed children, were confirmed in both age groups, preschool (p≤0.00) and early school age (p≤0.00). Children with SLI had deficits in the use of all classes of words. The difficulties were manifested in the production of semantic words, as well as in the production of words that have no specific meaning (pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions). Also, deficits in the use of different words in discourse characterized children with SLI in both age groups (preschool and early school age).