The effect of phonological complexity on the order in which words are acquired in early childhood

Abstract

During the second year of life, children acquire words and expand their receptive and expressive vocabularies at a rapid pace. At this age, toddlers’ phonological abilities are also developing rapidly. The current study investigated the effect of phonological complexity of words on the order in which they are acquired, receptively and expressively. Data were collected from Hebrew-speaking parents of 881 typically developing toddlers: 417 girls and 464 boys, aged 1;0 to 2;0 years old. Parents reported on their child’s receptive and expressive vocabularies by completing a computerized version of the Hebrew adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Phonological complexity scores of the target words were calculated using the Phonological Mean Length of Utterances measure. The proportion of children who were reported to understand and produce each word at each age was calculated. Results showed that phonological complexity affected the acquisition of word comprehension and word production. Words that are less phonologically complex were acquired earlier, representing a process of subconscious selection of words that are easier to produce.

Semantic maturation during the comprehension‐expression gap in late and typical talkers

“…Further research could evaluate if children learn more semantic information through contextual diversity when considering root words with different morphemes (e.g., jump vs. jumping). In addition, though this research has used contextual diversity to evaluate the ability of semantic maturation to explain differences between LT and TT populations, other word properties such frequency, concreteness, phonology, and even object features have been shown to play a role (Engelthaler & Hills, 2017;Gendler-Shalev et al, 2021;Hills et al, 2009a;Stella et al, 2017;Storkel & Lee, 2011). Though measures of contextual diversity are often found to be more explanatory than frequency in direct comparisons (e.g., Adelman et al, 2006;Baayen, 2010;Hills et al, 2009aHills et al, , 2010Johns & Jones, 2022), future work will be needed to evaluate the potential role of frequency and other word properties during semantic maturation.…”

Which phonological and lexical factors best influence whether a word is produced and pronounced well?

“…Phonetic complexity has been operationalized in different ways, either by counting the number of phonemes in the target wordthat is, its word lengthor by coding the featural and structural properties of the target word (e.g., presence of dorsals, fricatives, codas, clusters, etc.) using the Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC, Jakielski, 2000), or even by coding the phonological mean length of utterance (Gendler-Shalev, Ben-David, & Novogrodsky, 2021). Studies indicate that word length (in phonemes) is a significant predictor of a word's age of acquisition (Jones & Brandt, 2019b;Maekawa & Storkel, 2006;Storkel, 2004).…”