Chapter 9. Invariance in variation

Sophie Kern (1) , Christophe dos Santos (2)

1 DDL - Dynamique Du Langage
2 iBraiN - Imaging, Brain & Neuropsychiatry

This article examines the influence of word frequency (WF) and neighbourhood density (ND) in vocabulary acquisition of French-speaking children. Data were collected through the French version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. A regression analysis based on 462 children aged between 16 and 30 months who have acquired at least 5 words revealed that ND and WF together predicted 45% of the variance in vocabulary size, with ND and WF uniquely accounting for 32.2% and 12.8% of that variance respectively. The same analysis was done with nouns and predicates only. For no uns, the model predicted 64.6% of the variance whereas for predicates, the size of predicate vocabulary was not correlated with either of the two variables.

Mots clés: French; lexicon; development; word frequency; neighbourhood density

Domaines: Linguistique; Linguistique

Sophie Kern, Christophe dos Santos. Chapter 9. Invariance in variation: frequency and neighbourhood density as predictors of vocabulary size. Sources of variation in first language acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners, 22, pp.183-200, 2018, Trends in Language Acquisition Research, ⟨10.1075/tilar.22.10ker⟩. ⟨hal-01996411⟩