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Self-reported parental vocabulary input frequency for young children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2018

Dorthe BLESES ,
Werner VACH  and
Philip S. DALE
Dorthe BLESES
Affiliation:
TrygFonden's Centre for Child Research and School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark
Werner VACH
Affiliation:
University Hospital Basel, Switzerland
Philip S. DALE*
Affiliation:
Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences, University of New Mexico, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences, University of New Mexico, 1700 Lomas Blvd NE, Suite 1300, Albuquerque, NM 87131. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Vocabulary input frequency influences age of acquisition, and is also an essential control for investigating the influence of other factors. We propose a new method of frequency estimation, self-report. 918 Danish-speaking parents of 12–36-month-old children estimated their frequency of use of 725 words. Self-report was substantially correlated with both language sample based frequencies (0.67) and frequencies of a large written corpus of Danish (0.58). Correlations within vocabulary categories between frequency and age of acquisition, restricted to words occurring in the language samples, were comparable for the two estimates. Overall, self-report based frequency estimates appear to have a promising degree of validity, which reflects their greatest strength, independence of the situation.

Keywords

vocabularyinputparent
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 5 , September 2018 , pp. 1073 - 1090
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

†

We are grateful to the parents who provided the information about their children for this study. We also thank Rune Jørgenson of Southern Denmark University, who set up the online system for data collection, Ivan Iachine for data preparation, and Laila Kjaerbaek for assistance with the language samples. Access to datafiles and the web-administered questionnaire is available via the Open Science Framework at <http://osf.io/bjgct>.

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