Exploring Word Learning in a High-Density Longitudinal Corpus

Abstract

What is the role of the linguistic environment in children’s early word learning? Here we provide a preliminary analy-sis of one child’s linguistic development, using a portion of the high-density longitudinal data collected for the Human Speechome Project. We focus particularly on the develop-ment of the child’s productive vocabulary from the age of 9 to 24 months and the relationship between the child’s language development and the caregivers ’ speech. We find significant correlations between input frequencies and age of acquisition for individual words. In addition, caregivers ’ utterance length, type-token ratio, and proportion of single-word utterances all show significant temporal relationships with the child’s devel-opment, suggesting that caregivers “tune ” their utterances to the linguistic ability of the child.