The Words Children Hear and See: Lexical Diversity Across‐Modalities and Its Impact on Lexical Development

ABSTRACT Early vocabulary development benefits from diverse lexical exposures within children's language environment. However, the influence of lexical diversity on children as they enter middle childhood and are exposed to multimodal language inputs remains unclear. This study evaluates global...

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Vydáno v:Developmental science Ročník 28; číslo 2; s. e13601 - n/a
Hlavní autoři: Li, Luan, Song, Ming, Cai, Qing
Médium: Journal Article
Jazyk:angličtina
Vydáno: England Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.03.2025
Témata:
Age of onset
Child
Child development
Child Language
Child, Preschool
Childhood
Children
Children & youth
Childrens health
Chinese languages
Female
Global local relationship
Humans
Language
Language acquisition
Language Development
lexical development
lexical diversity
Male
middle childhood
multimodal language environments
Multimodality
Printing
Speech
Vocabulary
Vocabulary development
Words
multimodal language environments
lexical development
lexical diversity
middle childhood
ISSN:1363-755X, 1467-7687, 1467-7687
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Popis
Shrnutí:ABSTRACT Early vocabulary development benefits from diverse lexical exposures within children's language environment. However, the influence of lexical diversity on children as they enter middle childhood and are exposed to multimodal language inputs remains unclear. This study evaluates global and local aspects of lexical diversity in three 1.6‐million‐word child‐directed corpora, representing average Chinese children's speech, print, and media language environments. Additionally, pseudo‐multimodal samples were compiled from the three corpora to compare with the unimodal environments on lexical diversity. We then investigated the associations between lexical diversity and the acquisition of 361 words spanning early‐to‐middle childhood. The findings show that print and pseudo‐multimodal language provided the most diverse lexical environments, whereas speech exhibited the least diversity. However, speech diversity most strongly predicted lexical development, particularly before the onset of middle childhood. Exploratory analysis revealed that lexical diversity of other modalities emerged as stronger predictors thereafter. Early lexical development was best predicted by words’ variations in connectivity with other words within an immediate context, whereas in middle childhood, variations in words’ occurrences in larger context windows became the primary predictor, implicating children's growing ability to attend to linguistic contexts of increasing sizes. Importantly, higher diversity was consistently associated with earlier word acquisition across measures and developmental phases. These findings underscore the critical role of varied lexical experiences in children's language development.
Bibliografie:Luan Li and Ming Song contributed equally to this work.
Funding
This work was funded by the National Science and Technology Innovation 2030 (STI 2030—Major Projects 2021ZD0200500), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31970987 to Qing Cai), and the National Social Science Fund of China (23CYY040 to Luan Li).
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ISSN:1363-755X
1467-7687
1467-7687
DOI:10.1111/desc.13601