The precocious two-year-old: status of the lexicon and links to the grammar

Karla Kay McGregor · Li Sheng · Bruce L. Smith

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Language Development and Disorders Reading and Literacy Development Child and Animal Learning Development

Abstract

This is a study of the lexical and grammatical abilities of 16 lexically precocious talkers. These children, aged 2;0 were compared to their age-matched peers, 22 typical talkers aged 2;0, and their expressive vocabulary-matched peers, 22 typical talkers aged 2;6. Individual differences in children's lexical knowledge at 2;0 were stable--evident in parent report, laboratory observation, and an experimental fast-mapping paradigm. In accordance with the continuity hypothesis, the lexically precocious children were also grammatically precocious, having a greater representation of grammatical types and tokens and more advanced combinatorial language than their typical age-matches. Their grammatical development was very similar to that of their older vocabulary-matched peers. Limits on continuity were highly constrained with no true dissociation between the lexicon and the grammar in 33 cases examined. We conclude that, among two-year-olds, grammatical development is more tightly associated with the size of the lexicon than with chronological age.

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References

1992The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk 2000How Children Learn the Meanings of Words 1991Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender.1988From First Words to Grammar: Individual Differences and Dissociable Mechanisms 2000Do young children have adult syntactic competence?2002Language input and child syntax 1989The Language Development Survey 1994First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development

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