Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T13:03:20.501Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Observational and checklist measures of vocabulary composition: what do they mean?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Julian M. Pine ,
Elena V. M. Lieven  and
Caroline Rowland
Julian M. Pine*
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
Elena V. M. Lieven
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Caroline Rowland
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
*
Department of Psychology, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK. E-mail: jp@nott.psyc.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Observational and checklist measures of vocabulary composition have both recently been used to look at the absolute proportion of nouns in children's early vocabularies. However, they have tended to generate rather different results. The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between such measures in a sample of 26 children between 1;1 and 2;1 at approximately 50 and 100 words. The results show that although observational and checklist measures are significantly correlated, there are also systematic quantitative differences between them which seem to reflect a combination of checklist, maternal-report and observational sampling biases. This suggests that, although both kinds of measure may represent good indices of differences in vocabulary size and composition across children and hence be useful as dependent variables in correlational research, neither may be ideal for estimating the absolute proportion of nouns in children's vocabularies. The implication is that questions which rely on information about the absolute proportion of particular kinds of words in children's vocabularies can only be properly addressed by detailed longitudinal studies in which an attempt is made to collect more comprehensive vocabulary records for individual children.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , October 1996 , pp. 573 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

We would like to thank all the families that took part in the research reported here. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Grant Number: R000234221.

References

REFERENCES

Au, T. K., Dapretto, M. & Song, Y. K. (1994). Input versus constraints: early word acquisition in Korean and English. Journal of Memory and Languages 33, 567–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, E., Bretherton, I. & Snyder, L. (1988). From first words to grammar: individual differences and dissociable mechanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bates, E., Marchman, V., Thal, D., Fenson, L., Dale, P., Reznick, J. S., Reilly, J. & Hartung, J. (1994). Developmental and stylistic variation in the composition of early vocabulary. Journal of Child Language 21, 85–123.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bloom, L., Tinker, E. & Margulis, C. (1993). The words children learn: evidence against a noun bias in early vocabularies. Cognitive Development 8, 431–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bretherton, I., McNew, S., Snyder, L. & Bates, E. (1983). Individual differences at twenty months: analytic and holistic strategies in language acquisition. Journal of Child Language 10, 293–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caselli, M. C., Bates, E., Casadio, P., Fenson, J., Fenson, L., Sanderl, L. & Weir, J. (1995). A cross-linguistic study of early lexical development. Cognitive Development 10, 159–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choi, S. & Gopnik, A. (1995). Early acquisition of verbs in Korean: a cross-linguistic study. Journal of Child Language 22, 1–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dale, P., Bates, E., Reznick, J. & Morisset, C. (1989). The validity of a parent report instrument of child language at twenty months. Journal of Child Language 16, 239–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Bates, E., Thal, D. J. & Pethick, S. J. (1994). Variability in early communicative development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 59 (5, Serial No. 242).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In Kuczaj, S. A. (ed.), Language development, II: Language, thought and culture. Hillsdale, NJ; Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Gopnik, A. & Choi, S. (1995). Names, relational words, and cognitive development in English and Korean speakers: nouns are not always learned before verbs. In Tomasello, M. & Merriman, W. E. (eds), Beyond names for things: young children's acquisition of verbs. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Hampson, J. (1989). Elements of style: maternal and child contributions to referential and expressive styles of language acquisition. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. City University of New York.Google Scholar
Lieven, E. V. M. & Pine, J. M. (1990). Review of ‘From first words to grammar: individual differences and dissociable mechanisms’ by Bates, E., Bretherton, I. and Snyder, L.. Journal of Child Language 17, 495–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M. & Dresner-Barnes, H. (1992). Individual differences in early vocabulary development: redefining the referential-expressive distinction. Journal of Child Language 19, 287–310.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nelson, K. (1973). Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 38 (1–2).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, K., Hampson, J. & Kessler Shaw, L. (1993). Nouns in early lexicons: evidence, explanations and implications. Journal of Child Language 20, 61–84.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Peters, A. M. (1977). Language learning strategies: does the whole equal the sum of the parts? Language 53, 560–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, A. M. (1983). The units of language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pine, J. M. (1992). How referential are ‘referential’ children? Relationships between maternal-report and observational measures of vocabulary composition and usage. Journal of Child Language 19, 75–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pine, J. M. & Lieven, E. V. M. (1990). Referential style at thirteen months: why age-defined cross-sectional measures are inappropriate for the study of strategy differences in early language development. Journal of Child Language 17, 625–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pine, J. M. & Lieven, E. V. M. (1993). Reanalysing rote-learned phrases: individual differences in the transition to multi-word speech. Journal of Child Language 20, 551–71.Google ScholarPubMed
Tardif, T. (1996). Nouns are not always learned before verbs: Evidence from Mandarin speakers' early vocabularies. Developmental Psychology 32, 492–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar