How the characteristics of words in child-directed speech differ from adult-directed speech to influence children's productive vocabularies

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Jones, G. ORCID: 0000-0003-3867-9947, Cabiddu, F., Barrett, D.J.K., Castro, A. and Lee, B., 2023. How the characteristics of words in child-directed speech differ from adult-directed speech to influence children's productive vocabularies. First Language. ISSN 0142-7237

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237221150070

Abstract

Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children's vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is known about any differences in the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens from adult speech directed at children (from caregiver-child transcriptions) to the same quantity directed at adults. We show that child-directed speech contains greater numbers of words that are lower in phonemic length, higher in frequency, lower in phonotactic probability, and higher in neighborhood density than adult-directed speech; furthermore, child-directed speech explains over twice the variability of children's productive noun vocabularies than adult-directed speech. These findings indicate that children's word production is clearly influenced by the characteristics of the words spoken directly to them and that researchers need to be wary of using adult-directed language corpora when calculating lexical measures.

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

First Language

Creators:

Jones, G., Cabiddu, F., Barrett, D.J.K., Castro, A. and Lee, B.

Publisher:

SAGE Publications

Date:

31 January 2023

ISSN:

0142-7237