engleski

Vocabulary composition in the early lexical development of Croatian children

Early lexical development is characterised by changes in the size and composition of children’s vocabulary. Previous studies have reported cross-linguistic differences in the composition of children’s vocabulary, which could be due to methodological differences (parent reports vs. longitudinal corpora). The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between vocabulary composition and age of acquisition (AoA) in Croatian. The analysis was conducted on language samples of two female children aged 1 ; 5 to 2 ; 8 using the Croatian corpus of child language. We calculated the ratios of nouns (PN), predicates (PP), and function words (PF) in the lemmas for each month. Antonija’s data showed a strong correlation between PN nouns and AoA (rs(14) = .78), and between predicates PP and AoA (rs(14) = .79). There was a strong correlation between PF function words and AoA (rs(14) = -.94) (all p < .01). In Marina’s data, we found a strong correlation between PN and AoA (rs(15) = -.70, p < .01) and a moderate correlation between PP and AoA (rs(15) = .62, p < .05). The correlation between PF and the AoA did not reach the significance (rs(15) = .08, p > .05). The present study shows that the ratio of predicates increases from an early age. However, the ratios of function words and nouns show individual differences, decreasing with age or showing no correlation with age. These results differ slightly from previous studies on Croatian, especially regarding the ratio of nouns. Our study contributes to cross-linguistic knowledge of vocabulary acquisition.

Vocabulary composition ; Early language development ; Corpus analysis ; Croatian

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