How idiosyncratic are 2-3 year olds' vocabularies?

[Ping Li]

Linda's important question could be addressed if someone goes into the
CHILDES database and runs a huge contingency table of every word by every
other word for each child and for each month/age. One could compute the
likelihood of how likely a pair words co-occur for every child (or a group
of children) at any given age.

Ping


On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 9:58 AM, Linda Smith <smith4 at indiana.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This is a very interesting question.  In an unpublished study (for reasons
> noted below), Shohei Hidaka (a former post doc) and I looked at the MCDI
> productive vocabularies for over 100 children from 18 to 30 months.  We
> asked how well any one word predicted knowing another word --across
> children or groups of children --at any point in time.  It is like doing a
> big Chi square.  Does, for example,  --across children --knowing "milk"
> predicts already knowing "dog"  (not because they are semantically related
> but because of regularities in the acquisition and ordering of words).
>  There were differences among groups of children (slower versus more rapid
> learners), and also hints of changes with age --converging to being all
> statistically alike with age and more different young.
>
> BUT the problem is the measure.  The MCDI was specifically made --and
> constrained to --the words most children acquired (had to be produced by
> 50% of children at 30 months in original normative sample to be included).
> This was done so that it would be useful as a relative measure, but is
> minimizes the idioscyncracies and make make the hard to find.  Diary
> studies or recordings might be better.
>
> Anyway, I think this is something the field really needs to answer.
>
> Linda Smith
>
> On Monday, November 19, 2012 6:47:46 PM UTC-5, Elena Nicoladis wrote:
>>
>> Dear colleagues,
>> I'm trying to find some sort of quantification of how idiosyncratic
>> children aged 2-3 years are in terms of vocabulary. Has anyone, for
>> example, attempted something as foolhardy as calculating the average
>> percentage of words shared by all/most/some preschoolers??
>>
>> Any leads would be much appreciated.
>> Elena
>>
>> --
>> Elena Nicoladis
>>
>> "Since all the sciences, and especially psychology, are still immersed in
>> such tremendous realms of the uncertain and the unknown, the best that any
>> individual scientist, especially any psychologist, can do seems to be to
>> follow his own gleam and his own bent, however inadequate they may be. In
>> fact, I suppose that actually this is what we all do. In the end, the only
>> sure criterion is to have fun."
>> Edward Tolman
>>
>>  --
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