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Developments in early lexical comprehension: a comparison of parental report and controlled testing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 1999

MARGARET HARRIS  and
JOAN CHASIN
MARGARET HARRIS
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
JOAN CHASIN
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
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Abstract

Six children were studied from the age of 0;6 to 1;6 in order to chart their developing comprehension vocabularies from the first to the 100th word. Observational data were used in the first instance to identify newly comprehended words and then controlled testing was carried out for each word to confirm and expand the observational data. Comprehension of words was divided into four categories – object names, context-bound object words, action words and personal names. The relative frequency of the different categories of word was found to change with the size of the comprehension vocabulary as personal names decreased in importance and both object names and action words became increasingly more common. There was considerable variation among the six children especially in the proportion of object names and action words that they understood but vocabulary composition became highly stable between 60 and 100 words.

Type
NOTES
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 453 - 460
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This paper was written while the first author was in receipt of a Social Science Research Fellowship from the Nuffield foundation. The research was supported by grant number R000 23 2037 from the Economic and Social Research Council to the first author.