Early Lexical Development: A Corpus-Based Study of Three Languages

In this study, we present a crosslinguistic analysis of early lexical development in English, Mandarin and Cantonese based on large-scale child-adult interaction transcripts in the CHILDES database. We examined patterns of lexical composition for several lexical categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) in children and their caregivers’ vocabularies across eight different age groups from 13 to 60 months. A series of statistical methods were applied to analyze the developmental trajectories of lexical diversity of children’s speech. Our study overcomes several major methodological limitations of previous studies, and provides a clear and detailed picture of the similarities and differences in lexical development patterns: (1) in all three languages, children’s early language development shows increasing diversity as a function of time, and the child lexicon becomes more similar to that of their parents over time; and (2) language-specific differences in the linguistic input have strong influence on children’s language output, which is reflected in the varying percentages of nouns, verbs, and adjectives in the child’s productive lexicon at different developmental stages.