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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
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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

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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

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