Testing theories of the vocabulary spurt with monolingual and bilingual infants.

ABSTRACT: Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive changes. To test these theories, English-French monolingual and bilingual children with different exposure to each language were studied. Dense, longitudinal data were analyzed from 45 infants aged 16-30 months, whose expressive vocabulary was measured on a total of 617 occasions in English and/or French. Single-language (English and/or French), concept (number of concepts lexicalized across both languages), and word (sum of both languages) vocabula

SUBMITTER: Gomez Diaz M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11925217 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature