From uh-oh to tomorrow: Predicting age of acquisition for early words across languages.

Abstract

Why do children learn some words earlier than others? Reg-ularities and differences in the age of acquisition for wordsacross languages yield insights regarding the mechanismsguiding word learning. In a large-scale corpus analysis,we estimate the ages at which 9,200 children learn 300-400words in seven languages, predicting them on the basis ofindependently-derived linguistic, environmental, and concep-tual factors. Predictors were surprisingly consistent across lan-guages, but varied across development and as a function oflexical category (e.g., concreteness predicted nouns while lin-guistic structure predicted function words). By leveraging dataat a significantly larger scale than previous work, our analyseshighlight the power that emerges from unifying previously dis-parate theories, but also reveal the amount of reliable variationthat still remains unexplained.