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What is ‘word understanding’ for the parent of a one-year-old? Matching the difficulty of a lexical comprehension task to parental CDI report*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2008

SUZY STYLES  and
KIM PLUNKETT
SUZY STYLES*
Affiliation:
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford
KIM PLUNKETT
Affiliation:
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford
*
Address for Correspondence: Suzy Styles, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3UD, UK. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Is parental report of comprehension valid for individual words? If so, how well must an infant know a word before their parents will report it as ‘understood’? We report an experiment in which parental report predicts infant performance in a referent identification task at 1 ; 6. Unlike in previous research of this kind (i.e. Houston-Price, Mather & Sakkalou, 2007), infants saw items only once, and image pairs were taxonomic sisters. The match between parental report and infant behaviour provides evidence of the item-level accuracy of both measures of lexical comprehension, and informs our understanding of how British parents interpret standardized Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs).

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , September 2009 , pp. 895 - 908
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a Clarendon Fund Bursary to Suzy Styles, and grants to Kim Plunkett from the ESRC (Grant No. RES-000-23-1322) and the Leverhulme Trust. The authors would like to thank the staff of the John Radcliffe Hospital for their ongoing support.

References

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