Rate Of Vocabulary Growth Research Articles

Vocabulary growth in second language among immigrant school-aged children in Greece

ABSTRACTThe goal of the study was to assess differences between native Greek and bilingual, immigrant children of Albanian descent learning Greek as a second language on a receptive vocabulary measure. Vocabulary measures were obtained at five time points, 6 months apart, from 580 children attending Grades 2–4. Individual variability on both initial performance (intercept) and growth rate (slope) was assessed using hierarchical linear modeling, which included linguistic/ethnic group, parental education (as a socioeconomic status [SES] indicator), gender, and a measure of nonverbal cognitive ability as time-invariant predictors of vocabulary growth. Results indicated that linguistic/ethnic group, parental education, and baseline nonverbal cognitive ability were significant predictors of initial vocabulary scores, whereas only linguistic/ethnic group and nonverbal ability accounted for significant variability in vocabulary growth rates. Additional analyses confirmed that linguistic/ethnic group remained a significant predictor of receptive vocabulary knowledge at both the intercept and the slope levels even after controlling for the initial differences between groups on parental education and block design subtest scores.

Development of vocabulary in Spanish-speaking and Cantonese-speaking English language learners

ABSTRACTThis study examines vocabulary growth rates in first and second languages for Spanish-speaking and Cantonese-speaking English language learners from kindergarten through second grade. Growth-modeling results show a within-language effect of concepts about print on vocabulary. Language exposure also had an effect on English vocabulary: earlier English exposure led to larger English vocabulary in kindergarten. There was no interference of early English exposure on native-language vocabulary. Moreover, Cantonese-speaking children had higher English expressive vocabulary scores than Spanish-speaking children and this difference remained for the 3 years. In contrast, although there were no significant differences in first language vocabulary at the start of kindergarten, Spanish-speaking children had steeper growth rates in first-language vocabulary than Cantonese-speaking children, after controlling for language of instruction and first-language concepts about print.

Clinical assessment of early language development: A simplified short form of the mandarin communicative development inventory

ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to develop a practical mean for clinical evaluation of early pediatric language development by establishing developmental trajectories for receptive and expressive vocabulary growth in children between 6 and 32 months of age using a simple, time-efficient assessment tool. MethodsSimplified short form versions of the Words and Gestures and Words and Sentences vocabulary inventories in the Mandarin Communicative Development Inventory [1] were developed and used to assess early language development in developmentally normal children from 6 to 32 months of age during routine health checks. ResultsDevelopmental trajectories characterizing the rate of receptive and expressive vocabulary growth between 6 and 32 months of age are reported. These trajectories allow the equivalent age corresponding to a score to be determined after a brief structured interview with the child's parents that can be conducted in a busy clinical setting. ConclusionThe simplified short forms of the Mandarin Communicative Development Inventories can serve as a clinically useful tool to assess early child language development, providing a practical mean of objectively assessing early language development following early interventions to treat young children with hearing impairment as well as speech and language delays. Objective evidence of language development is essential for achievement of effective (re)habilitation outcomes.

An Innovative Approach to the Study of Word Learning Biases

A key question of development is how children detect structure in the environ-ment and use that structure to guide future learning. This is a question of particular interest to researchers inves-tigating language and category develop-ment. There is now an extensive body of research demonstrating that the dif-ficulty of first language acquisition and generalization is alleviated by a variety of word learning biases and constraints children may employ (e.g., Landau et al., 1988; Markman, 1989, 1992; Merriman et produce differences in in-the-moment al., 1989; Waxman and Kosowski, 1990). Perry and Samuelson (2011) focus on one of the most recently studied and well-documented biases, the “shape bias.” However, in contrast to the ways in which cognitive developmentalists have traditionally investigated this bias, Perry and Samuelson adopt a new approach, focusing on how individual differences in children’s vocabulary structure guide online attention during novel noun generalization.The shape bias refers to children’s ten-dency to extend object labels on the basis of similarity in shape rather than size, color, or material. Previous research has focused on how the size and structure of children’s noun vocabulary, particularly the number of words children produce labeling categories organized by similar-ity in shape or material, relate to shape bias development (e.g., Samuelson and Smith, 1999). With very few exceptions (e.g., Gershkoff-Stowe and Smith, 2004 ), this research has also focused entirely on children’s performance as a group. In marked contrast, Perry and Samuelson (2011) introduce a novel approach to studying word learning biases by focus-ing on individual differences in children’s vocabulary development and employ-ing an innovative measure of children’s vocabulary structure: “against the system” nouns.According to Perry and Samuelson (2011), “against the system” nouns derive their name from their inability to be classified on only one side of the ontological divide between categories defined by shape (solid + shape + count) and categories defined by material (non-solid + material + mass). Perry and Samuelson demonstrate that the size of individual children’s “against the system” vocabulary is a key predictor of individual children’s shape bias, more so than tradi-tional measures of children’s vocabulary for objects defined by shape or material. In doing so, they provide strong support for the role of prior learning in shaping future learning, and illustrate how online attention may be an important factor mediating this relation.Where do individual differences in young children’s vocabularies originate? Factors such as gender and exposure to speech have been found to contribute to individual differences in children’s rate of vocabulary growth (e.g., Huttenlocher et al., 1991). However, it is not yet known whether these or other factors may also contribute to differences in early vocabu-lary structure. In all likelihood, there are a host of factors leading to the individual differences observed in the early stages of children’s word learning, including charac-teristics of the child (e.g., gender, activity level, learning capacity) as well as charac-teristics of the caregiver (e.g., level of inter -action with the child) and of the physical environment (e.g., exposure to particular objects and people). Critically, however, Perry and Samuelson’s (2011) data suggest that the key to understanding early indi-vidual differences in vocabulary structure may lie not in examining such factors in isolation, but in considering the role each such factor may play in shaping children’s early attentional biases. For just as indi-vidual differences in vocabulary structure influence children’s noun generalization and attentional biases, it is probable that initial and/or prelinguistic attentional biases play a key role in the acquisition of children’s varied early vocabularies. Future research should address such initial atten-tional biases and how they may influence early word learning as well as later atten-tional biases.Perry and Samuelson (2011) introduce an exciting new way of conceptualizing and investigating children’s language and cat-egory development that has far-reaching applications for developmental science. By this account, the key questions involve how prior experiences with language, objects, and people work together to guide attention and how individual differences in attention learning. Approaching development from this perspective will push the field forward in answering questions about how the structure of the child’s environment relates not only to the development of word learn-ing biases, but also to thinking and learning more broadly.

Nouns and verbs in the vocabulary acquisition of Italian children

The vocabulary development of 24 Italian children aged between 1;4 and 1;6 at the beginning of the study was longitudinally monitored on a monthly basis using the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory drawn up by their mothers. This study analyzes data from children for whom two sampling stages were available; the first corresponding to a vocabulary size as close as possible to 200 words (mean 217, range 167-281), the second to a vocabulary size ranging from 400 to 650 words (mean 518, range 416-648). The children's vocabulary composition was analyzed by calculating, for each sampling stage, the percentage of common nouns, verbs and closed-class words. The increase in percentage points of the various lexical items between the first and second sampling stages was also analyzed. Data confirmed the predominance of nouns over verbs and closed-class words at both sampling stages, while verbs and closed-class words showed a higher percentage increase than nouns. The results provide evidence that children who reached the first sampling point at an earlier age had a higher percentage of nouns than children who reached the same stage at an older age. However, in the passage from the first to the second sampling point no relationship emerged between a style of acquisition based on the acquisition of nouns and an increase in the rate of vocabulary growth.

Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender.

This study examines the role of exposure to speech in children's early vocabulary growth. It is generally assumed that individual differences in vocabulary depend, in large part, on variations in learning capacity. However, variations in exposure have not been systematically explored. In this study we characterize vocabulary growth rates for each of 22 children by using data obtained at several time points from 14 to 26 months. We find a substantial relation between individual differences in vocabulary acquisition and variations in the amount that particular mothers speak to their children. The relation between amount of parent speech and vocabulary growth, we argue, reflects parent effects on the child, rather than child-ability effects on the parent or hereditary factors. We also find that gender is an important factor in rate of vocabulary growth. Early childhood is a period of rapid linguistic development. By 2 years, the average child acquires 900 root words (cf. Carey, 1978) and at least a rudimentary syntax (cf. Brown, 1973). Although there has been considerable recent interest in syntactic development, much less attention has been devoted to lexical development. Yet in tracing the development of language from its inception, lexical development must necessarily be a focus of study because the acquisition of words constitutes the child's initial achievement as a language user. A certain amount of vocabulary must be acquired before words can be combined into sentences, and, indeed, several months elapse between the time children start to produce words and the time they start to produce multiword utterances. In addition, vocabulary and syntax are not independent aspects of language knowledge; for example, verbs frequently encode actions involving relations among entities (e.g., give, feed) which are specified by the verb together with its arguments. A major concern in the recent work on syntactic development has been with the relative contributions of the child's innate preparedness for language versus language input. Yet the rapid growth of vocabulary in early childhood also is a manifestation of the human preparedness for language, and parallel questions arise concerning the relative contributions of capacity and input. Especially at the start of language learning, innate preparedness surely plays a role in acquiring word meanings because inferences about meanings are based on pairings of words with situations. As Quine (1969) has persuasively argued, the variety of aspects of a situation which might be encoded by a word is enormous. Because of this, Gleitman and Wanner (1982) point out, it seemscritical to posit innately available constraints on the possible meanings children entertain.