Developmental differences in the effects of phonological, lexical and semantic variables on word learning by infants
Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: The influence of phonological (i.e., individual sounds), lexical (i.e., whole-word forms) and semantic (i.e., meaning) characteristics on the words known by infants age 1.4 to 2.6 was examined, using an existing database (Dale & Fenson, 1996). For each noun, word frequency, two phonological (i.e., positional segment average, biphone average), two lexical (i.e., neighborhood density, word length) and four semantic variables (i.e., semantic set size, connectivity, probability resonance, resonance strength) were computed. Regression analyses showed that more infants knew (1) words composed of low-probability sounds and sound pairs, (2) shorter words with high neighborhood density, and (3) words that were semantically related to other words, both in terms of the number and strength of semantic connections. Moreover, the effect of phonological variables was constant across age, whereas the effect of lexical and semantic variables changed across age.
Source: Journal of Child Language
Author: HOLLY L. STORKEL
Institution: University of Kansas
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: G224740068, G2872536077, G4153205649, THE MENTAL LEXICON IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, G4405522605, Word Learning in Children: Normal Development and Language Impairment, Kansas Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (KIDDRC), Core Center for BioBehavioral Sciences of Communication Disorders
OpenAlex ID: W2103579277