It's All in the Interaction: Early Acquired Words Are Both Frequent and Highly Imageable.

ABSTRACT: Prior studies have found that children are more likely to learn words that are frequent in the input and highly imageable. Many theories of word learning, however, predict that these variables should interact, particularly early in development: frequency of a form is of little use if you cannot infer its meaning, and a concrete word cannot be acquired if you never hear it. The present study explores this interaction, how it changes over time and its relationship to syntactic category effects in children acquiring American English. We analyzed 1461 monolingual English-speaking children aged 1;4-2;6 from the MB-CDI norming study (Fenson et al., 1994). Word frequency was estimated from the CHILDES database, and imageability was measured using adult ratings. There was a strong over-additive in

SUBMITTER: Coffey JR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10990573 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature