{"pk":21404,"title":"Predicting ages of acquisition for children's early vocabulary across 27 languages and dialects","subtitle":null,"abstract":"What factors contribute to the growth of children's early vocabulary? One method for exploring this question is investigating predictors (e.g., frequency) that differentiate words learnt earlier from those learnt later. A more comprehensive account requires the examination of multiple language families and multiple levels of linguistic representation (e.g., phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic). Here, we studied 10 predictors of word ages of acquisition across 27 languages and dialects. We found that words that were more frequent, concrete, and associated with babies were learnt earlier, whereas words that had greater length in phonemes and mean length of utterance were learnt later. There was no reliable effect of other morphosyntactic predictors, or of phonological neighbourhood. We found evidence of a tradeoff between a language's morphological complexity and the effect of syntactic complexity for predicates, supporting the competition model. Predictor coefficients revealed broad consistency across all languages, along with variability that reflected language family classifications.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Development; Language development; Language learning; Bayesian modeling; Big data; Cross-linguistic analysis; Developmental analysis; Statistics"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3s69v6kt","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Alvin","middle_name":"Wei Ming","last_name":"Tan","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Georgia","middle_name":"","last_name":"Loukatou","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Mika","middle_name":"","last_name":"Braginsky","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Jess","middle_name":"","last_name":"Mankewitz","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Wisconsin - Madison","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Frank","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21404/galley/11003/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21404/galley/21849/download/"}]}