Dong, S;
Gu, Y;
Vigliocco, G;
(2021)
The impact of child-directed language on children’s lexical development.
In:
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
(pp. pp. 1444-1450).
Cognitive Science Society (CSS): Virtual.
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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.
Type: | Proceedings paper |
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Title: | The impact of child-directed language on children’s lexical development |
Event: | 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society |
Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
Publisher version: | https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38x9h9h4 |
Language: | English |
Additional information: | This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
Keywords: | Child-directed language; word learning; language input; lexical sophistication; lexical diversity; yes-no questions |
UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology |
URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10142029 |
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