Two empirical studies set out to explore the relation between breadth and depth of word
knowledge and to link these concepts with language acquisition and frequency of language input.
In the first study, the breadth and depth of word knowledge of 50 Dutch monolingual and
bilingual kindergartners were investigated using receptive vocabulary, description, and association
tasks. The second study examined the relation between the probability of knowing a word and the
input frequency of that word in 1,600 Dutch monolingual and bilingual 4- and 7-year-olds. These
studies found that there was no conceptual distinction between breadth and depth of vocabulary,
and that breadth and depth were affected by the same factors for both monolingual and bilingual
speakers. Very high correlations were found between monolingual and bilingual speakers with
respect to the probability of knowing a word, which was strongly related to the input frequency in
primary education.
The purpose of the present study was to examine the relations between communicative competence and five dimensions of personality in 241 first and second language-learning children in The Netherlands. To determine the underlying communicative competence of the first and second language learners of Dutch, a broad array of linguistic measures and teacher judgments were collected. Observational scales referring to the Big Five personality factors were used to characterize the children's personalities. The results showed that three basic components underlie both the monolingual and bilingual children's communicative competence: organizational competence, involving lexical, syntactic, discourse, and functional abilities; pragmatic competence, involving sociocultural routines and illocutionary force; and strategic competence, involving the planning and monitoring of communicative behavior. The relations between the different dimensions of personality and the components of communicative competence revealed the following patterns to characterize first language learners: conscientiousness and emotional stability correlated with basic organizational skills; openness to experience correlated with pragmatic competence; and a broad range of personality characteristics with the acquisition of communicative strategies. In contrast, primarily openness to experience and, to a lesser extent, conscientiousness and extraversion were found to be related to the buildup of basic organizational skills, the acquisition of pragmatic skills, and the development of monitoring strategies in second language learners.
In spontaneous speech data, lexical richness is generally operationalized by measures in which the relation between the number of types and tokens plays a role, of which the Type/Token Ratio (TTR) is the most famous. This article discusses the reliability and validity of different measures of lexical richness in various language data research and computer simulations, and examines the behaviour of these measures in spontaneous speech data of first language and second language children learning Dutch, aged four to seven, compared with their lexical abilities as measured by tests. The results show that neither the validity nor the reliability of the measures were satisfactory, especially the widely applied TTR. Initially, the number of types, or lemmas, and the Guiraud and Uber indexes seem to be adequate measures. However, in later stages of vocabulary acquisition (from 3000 words on) neither is valid. It is suggested that more effective measures of lexical richness might be based not on the distribution of or the relation between the types and tokens, but on the degree of difficulty of the words used, as measured by their (levels of) frequency in daily language input.
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