Lexical composition of the vocabulary of four-year-old children from different social groups and its relationship to the linguistic environment

Abstract

The aim of this study was to analyze the lexical composition of child expressive vocabulary and its relationship with linguistic input of four-year-old children from different social backgrounds. From a spontaneous speech corpus, we analyzed the transcriptions of 19 children from two different social backgrounds (n = 38), corresponding to 456 hours of recordings, and we analyzed the lexical diversity and quantity of nouns, adjectives, and verbs, both in child vocabulary and input they were exposed to. The analysis of variance showed that in both cases there was a greater noun type quantity compared to the other word classes, but a greater token quantity of verbs. Beta regressions with child vocabulary as a dependent variable showed that belonging to a socioeconomic group was a predictor of the three lexical classes’ types, but only of the adjective’s tokens; the presence of each word class in the linguistic input was a predictor of all three word classes, and only of adjective and verb types. These results manifest the complexity of early childhood experiences and the need to pay attention to the various contexts where children acquire language.