How idiosyncratic are 2-3 year olds' vocabularies?

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Elena,
    Jean Berko-Gleason and Richard Ely worked things related to this issue.  The children they studied were a bit older and the emphasis there was on different recording situations, but they found that there was a great deal of non-overlap across situations and also across children.  Of course, this type of glass can be half full and half empty.  Common function words are going to overlap; it is for the less frequent words that we find the strong non-overlap.  Jean's corpora are in CHILDES and the papers are mostly from the late 1990s.  Jean can provide more info.  
  By the way, when you talk about "percentage of words", I wonder if you mean types or tokens?  I assume you mean types.

-- Brian MacWhinney

On Nov 20, 2012, at 12:47 AM, Elena Nicoladis <elenan at ualberta.ca> 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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