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

Jones, Gary, Cabiddu, Francesco, Barrett, Doug J. K., Castro, Antonio and Lee, Bethany 2023. How the characteristics of words in child-directed speech differ from adult-directed speech to influence children’s productive vocabularies. First Language 43 (3) , pp. 253-282. 10.1177/01427237221150070

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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:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
ISSN:	0142-7237
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 January 2023
Date of Acceptance:	20 December 2022
Last Modified:	29 Jun 2023 16:40
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/156022

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