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Extended Statistical Learning as an account for slow vocabulary growth*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2011

STEPHANIE F. STOKES ,
SOPHIE KERN  and
CHRISTOPHE DOS SANTOS
STEPHANIE F. STOKES*
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
SOPHIE KERN
Affiliation:
Institut des Sciences de l'Homme, Lyon
CHRISTOPHE DOS SANTOS
Affiliation:
Unité Imagerie et Cerveau Inserm U930, Université François Rabelais de Tours
*
[*]Address for correspondence: Stephanie F. Stokes, Department of Communication Disorders, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Stokes (2010) compared the lexicons of English-speaking late talkers (LT) with those of their typically developing (TD) peers on neighborhood density (ND) and word frequency (WF) characteristics and suggested that LTs employed learning strategies that differed from those of their TD peers. This research sought to explore the cross-linguistic validity of this conclusion. The lexicons (production, not recognition) of 208 French-speaking two-year-old children were coded for ND and WF. Regression revealed that ND and WF together predicted 62% of the variance in vocabulary size, with ND and WF uniquely accounting for 53% and 9% of that variance respectively. Epiphenomenal findings were ruled out by comparison of simulated data sets with the actual data. A generalized Mann–Whitney test showed that children with small vocabularies had significantly higher ND values and significantly lower WF values than children with large vocabularies. An extended statistical learning theory is proposed to account for the findings.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 105 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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