Arboretum, bureaucratic and carbohydrates : preschoolers' exposure to rare vocabulary at home

Abstract

Research on children's vocabulary growth indicates that children benefit from incidental exposure to new words in conversation. In this paper, we address questions about exposure to vocabulary in different conversational situations between mothers and their preschoolers (ages 3 and 4): mealtimes, book readings, eliciting a report of an event, and toy play. We found that different situations provided varying proportions of rare words, with the elicited reports providing few rare words and mealtimes providing many rare words. Book reading results were mixed, indicating some books provide more vocabulary exposure than others. Different contexts varied in their associations with the children's PPVT scores at age 5, suggesting that some contexts may be more potent sources for vocabulary learning than others