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Diary vs. representative checklist assessment of productive vocabulary*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

J. Steven Reznick*
Affiliation:
Yale University
Beverly A. Goldfield
Affiliation:
Rhode Island College
*
Psychology Department, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, Connecticut, 06520-8205, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract

Twenty-four infants were followed longitudinally from 1;2 to 1;10. Parents maintained diaries of the child's spoken words and at two-month intervals completed a representative checklist of words produced. There was good agreement across the two instruments and robust month-to-month correlations for both. However, the overall pattern of results suggests that the diary method is more effective during the early emergence of language and the representative checklist method is more effective late in the second year when vocabulary size becomes relatively large. Accurate longitudinal assessment of vocabulary may require a combination of the diary and checklist approaches.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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Footnotes

[*]

This study was supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Network on the Transition from Infancy to Childhood. We thank T. Bradford Johns, Jane Gibbons and Cybele Raver for their help with data collection, and the children and parents who so generously gave their time and energy. The manuscript has been improved greatly by suggestions from Donna Thal, Larry Fenson, Katharine Perera and several anonymous reviewers.

References

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