Toddlers' Verb Lexicon Diversity and Grammatical Outcomes

Pamela A. Hadley · Matthew Rispoli · Ning Hsu

71 citations0/0 files storedLanguage Speech and Hearing Services in Schools

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language Development and Disorders Hearing Impairment and Communication Child and Animal Learning Development

Abstract

PURPOSE: The goals of this study were to quantify longitudinal expectations for verb lexicon growth and to determine whether verb lexicon measures were better predictors of later grammatical outcomes than noun lexicon measures. METHOD: Longitudinal parent-report measures from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al., 2007) from ages 21 to 30 months from an archival database were used to model growth in common noun and verb lexicon size for 45 typically developing toddlers. Communicative Development Inventory growth coefficients and 24-month measures of lexical diversity from spontaneous language samples were used to predict 30-month grammatical outcomes on the Index of Productive Syntax (Scarborough, 1990). RESULTS: Average verb growth was characterized by 50.57 verbs at 24 months, with linear growth of 8.29 verbs per month and deceleration overall. Children with small verb lexicons or slow linear growth at 24 months accelerated during this developmental period. Verb lexicon measures were better predictors of grammatical outcomes than noun lexicon measures, accounting for 47.8% of the variance in Index of Productive Syntax scores. Lexical verb diversity in spontaneous speech emerged as the single best predictor. CONCLUSION: Measures of verb lexicon size and diversity should be included as part of early language assessment to guide clinical decision making with young children at risk for language impairment.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 71 citations exist upstream.

References

2003Constructing a language: a usage-based theory of language acquisition 2014Children with Specific Language Impairment 1991Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender.2005Constructing a Language 2005Child Psychology: A Handbook of Contemporary Issues 2010Sources of variability in children’s language growth 1996Toward Tense as a Clinical Marker of Specific Language Impairment in English-Speaking Children 1995Specific Language Impairment as a Period of Extended Optional Infinitive

Cited by

2015Diversity matters: parent input predicts toddler verb production 2018Sentence Diversity in Early Language Development: Recommendations for Target Selection and Progress Monitoring 2020Identifying Areas of Overlap and Distinction in Early Lexical Profiles of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Late Talkers, and Typical Talkers

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.