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Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners
Edited by Maya Hickmann †, Edy Veneziano and Harriet Jisa
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 22] 2018
► pp. 183–200

Chapter 9
Invariance in variation

Frequency and neighbourhood density as predictors of vocabulary size

| Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, CNRS & Université Lumière Lyon 2
| Université François-Rabelais, Tours & Centre Hospitalier Régional Universitaire de Tours, INSERM

This article examines the influence of word frequency (WF) and neighbourhood density (ND) in vocabulary acquisition of French-speaking children. Data were collected through the French version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. A regression analysis based on 462 children aged between 16 and 30 months who have acquired at least 5 words revealed that ND and WF together predicted 45% of the variance in vocabulary size, with ND and WF uniquely accounting for 32.2% and 12.8% of that variance respectively. The same analysis was done with nouns and predicates only. For nouns, the model predicted 64.6% of the variance whereas for predicates, the size of predicate vocabulary was not correlated with either of the two variables.

Keywords: lexicon, development, word frequency, neighbourhood density, French
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Frequency and lexical acquisition
    • 2.2Neighbourhood density and lexical acquisition
    • 2.3Frequency and neighbourhood density
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Subjects
    • 3.2Data collection
    • 3.3Data processing and coding
      • Data reduction
      • Frequency
      • Neighbourhood density
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1ND and WF as predictors of total vocabulary size
    • 4.2ND and WF as predictors of noun vocabulary size
    • 4.3ND and WF as predictors of predicate vocabulary size
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Further research
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 22 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.22.10ker
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