The most frequently used words: Comparing child-directed speech and young children's speech to inform vocabulary selection for aided input

Abstract

Transactional theories of communication development focus on the interplay among child, caregiver, and environmental variables. Typically, this interplay involves symmetry between receptive and expressive modes (i.e., speech), but is asymmetrical for children with complex communication needs who hear speech but use graphic symbols expressively. Aided input, during which a communication partner points to graphic symbols while talking, may increase symmetry, but it is challenging to determine which words to represent with graphic symbols to ensure adequate aided input is provided. In this study, secondary analysis of transcripts of 16 mothers who interacted with their children with typical development across 6 time points (between 9 and 15 months) revealed 267 words that comprised 80% of the 257,480 words the mothers used. This list of words that mothers used most frequently was compared to three existing lists of the expressive vocabulary used most frequently by 65 toddlers and preschoolers with typical development, indicating substantial overlap. The results suggest that there is a common set of frequently occurring words that mothers use in their daily interactions with infants and toddlers, and that these same words also comprise a significant proportion of the words most frequently used by young children. Implications for representing these frequently occurring words with graphic symbols on the communication systems of children with complex communication needs are discussed.

Looking for Wugs in all the Right Places: Children's Use of Prepositions in Word Learning

“…In test trials, without the presence of prepositional phrases (e.g., Look at the wug), children were able to correctly identify the target creature, suggesting that they had successfully associated the novel creature labels in training trials with their respective referents. Given that some prepositions (e.g., in and on) appear quite frequently in infant-directed speech (e.g., Quick et al, 2019) and become part of toddler's core vocabulary (Banajee, Dicarlo, & Stricklin, 2003), they may play a more important role in children's word learning than previously considered. In fact, our results showing that children can learn nouns from prepositions, interpreted alongside other studies showing that children can learn new prepositions from neighboring noun arguments (Casasola & Wilbourn, 2004;Fisher, Klinger, & Song, 2006;Landau & Stecker, 1990), suggest that children might have a rather sophisticated understanding of the relationships expressed between prepositions and their arguments, which could be useful in learning other types of relational terms (e.g., verbs).…”

“…Prepositions, being among the most frequent function words in children's language input (e.g., Quick, Erickson, & Mccright, 2019) as well as some of the earliest produced words (e.g., Tomasello, 1987), represent a subclass of function words that children may recruit early in acquisition to facilitate word learning. Starting in the first months of life, children begin to show conceptual knowledge of spatial relationships (Antell & Caron, 1985;Casasola, Cohen, & Chiarello, 2003;Quinn, 1994) and during the second year of life, begin to understand (Bremner & Idowu, 1987;Choi, McDonough, Bowerman, & Mandler, 1999;Clark, 1973;Meints, Plunkett, Harris, & Dimmock, 2002) and subsequently produce (Tomasello, 1987;Valian, 1986) spatial prepositions, with in, on, and under being among the first to appear (Johnston & Slobin, 1979).…”

Understanding Child-Directed Speech Around Book Reading in Toddler Classrooms: Evidence From Early Head Start Programs

“…When communicating with very young children, adults often systematically alter how they talk, using specialized, child-directed speech (CDS) that draws children’s attention and highlights the sounds in words, supporting vocabulary and other language outcomes ( Bryant and Barrett, 2007 ; Zauche et al, 2016 ). Most often studied among pre-verbal infants, CDS is characterized by unusual auditory features such as high pitch, slow pace, exaggerated prosody, and distinct timbre; as well as sparse word volume and frequent repetition of words, focus on concrete ideas, and simple syntactic structure ( Rowe, 2008 , 2012 ; Huttenlocher et al, 2010 ; Longobardi et al, 2016 ; Quick et al, 2019 ; Genovese et al, 2020 ; Rowe and Snow, 2020 ). Adults’ CDS changes as children progress into toddlerhood (e.g., 1–2 years of age) and begin to talk and respond on their own ( Durán et al, 2004 ; Hoff, 2014 ) using one-, two-, or three-word phrases (i.e., telegraphic speech) ( Rice et al, 2010 ) undergirded by basic syntax and grammar ( Hoff et al, 2018 ; Cadime et al, 2019 ).…”

Real-world statistics at two timescales and a mechanism for infant learning of object names

“…However, the frequency distribution of individual words in any sample is characterized by a power law ( 9 , 12 , 13 ); a very few words (function words, some light verbs) are very frequent, but most content words are individually rare. Object names, even common and early-learned ones, fall in the long tail of the frequency distribution of words in large corpora of parent speech to children that aggregate parents’ speech across many different contexts ( 9 , 13 – 15 ). The absolute frequency of early-learned object names even in these large corpora of child-directed speech is quite low.…”