Summary: vocabulary spurt in other languages and other contexts

[Ping Li]

Dear Colleagues,

As promised, I am posting a summary of the responses regarding my question
on vocabulary spurt in other languages and in other contexts.

Thanks go to the following colleagues who have provided detailed information:
John Bonvillian, Eve Clark, Hilke Elsen, Natalia Gagarina, Diane Leach,
Elena Nicoladis, Barbara Pearson, July Reilly, and Yasuhiro Shirai.

(1) There is evidence that vocabulary spurt occurs in other languages,
including Chinese, German, Korean, and Russian, although the timing and
shape of it may be different from English. Some useful references provided
are:

Bornstein, M. H., Cote, L. R., Maital, S., Painter, K., Park, S-Y., Pascual,
L., Pecheux, M-G., Ruel, J., Venuti, P., & Vyt, A. (2004). Cross-Linguistic
Analysis of Vocabulary in Young Children: Spanish, Dutch, French, Hebrew,
Italian, Korean, and American English. Child Development, 75(4), 1115-1139.

Elsen, H. 1996. Two routes to language. Stylistic variation in one child.
First Language 16. 141-158.

Natalia Gagarina & Dagmar Bittner. On correlation between the emergence of
finite verbs and the development of utterances in Russian and German.
Berlin:
ZAS Papers in Linguistics/ 2004/33, 13-38.

Voeikova, M., & N. Gagarina. MLU, first lexicon, and the early stages in
the acquisition of case forms by two Russian children. In /LINCOM
studies in theoretical linguistics 29: Pre- and Protomorphology. Early
Phases of Morphological Development in Nouns and Verbs/, ed. M. Voeikova
and W.U. Dressler, 115-131.

(2) One article that has examined vocabulary spurt in bilingualism is:

Pearson, Barbara Zurer and Sylvia C. Fernandez (1994). Patterns of
interaction in the lexical growth in two languages of bilingual infants
and toddlers. Language Learning 44:4, 617-653.

(3) Two articles, one showing no apparent spurt, another showing a less
steep acceleration in the sign language domain, are:

Anderson, D. & Reilly, J. (2002). The MacArthur Communicative Development
Inventory: The Normative Data for American Sign Language.  Deaf Studies
and Deaf Education,7:83-106.

Bonvillian, J., Orlansky, M., Novack, L. (1983). Developmental milestones:
Sign language acquisition and motor development. Child Development, 54,
1435-1445.

My own summary of the English literature is this: While there is a great
deal of interest in vocabulary spurt (e.g., Bates & Carnevale, 1993; Bates
& Goodman, 1997; Elman et al., 1996; McCarthy, 1946; van Geert, 1991;
Woodward et al., 1994), there has been no satisfactory integrative
account. Previous research has debated on (1) whether vocabulary spurt
occurs as a function of variables intrinsic to word learning (e.g.,
phonological ability, lexical representation, or word retrieval ability)
or variables related to general cognitive development (e.g.,
categorization ability, naming insight, or symbol insight), (2) whether
the spurt is restricted to particular types of words (nouns versus other
types) or to particular modality (production versus comprehension), and
(3) whether the spurt differs for individual children in when it occurs,
how it occurs, or whether it occurs at all (Bloom, 2000; Dapretto & Bjork,
2000; Ganger & Brent, 2004; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1987; McShane, 1980;
Reznick  & Goldfield, 1990, 1992; Plunkett, 1993; Woodward et al., 1994).

With best wishes, and happy ‘vocab-spurting’.

Ping Li



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Ping Li, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Director, Cognitive Science Laboratory
Department of Psychology, University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173, USA
Email: pli at richmond.edu
Phone: (804) 289-8125 (O), 287-1236 (lab); Fax: (804) 287-1905
http://www.richmond.edu/~pli/  or  http://cogsci.richmond.edu/
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