A database for semantic, grammatical, and frequency properties of the first words acquired by Italian children

Abstract

In this study, we analyze semantic, grammatical, and frequency characteristics of the first words acquired by Italian children (Child's First Vocabulary, or CFV), drawn from the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI;Fenson et al., 1993). The CDI is an instrument for the collection of reliable information on early language development-that is, in the age range of 8-30 months. It is organized into two distinct questionnaires. The first, Gestures and Words (ages 8-16 months), is used for the collection of information on the comprehension and production of words and on the use of communicative gestures. The second questionnaire, Words and Phrases (ages 16-30 months), is used to collect information on word production and on grammatical, syntactic, and morphological competence. The questionnaires are compiled by parents on the basis of written instructions. The score for each child can be converted into a percentile score and compared with the scores of other children of the same age. This instrument has been translated and adapted for use with children of different cultures and languages.In preceding studies, in which norms for age of acquisition were derived from subjective estimates of adults, it was found that words acquired early have highly imageable referents and are very frequent in the written lexicon of children in primary school and in both the written and spoken lexicons of adults (for the case of Italian, see Barca, Burani, & Arduino, 2002). The main goal of the present study was to identify the imageability and frequency properties of the words in the CFV, and to assess whether the correlations that hold among the variables for these words acquired very early (before 30 months of age) are similar to the correlations that have been described for other word samples. The second goal was to verify if the CFV has the same proportions of nouns, verbs, and adjectives as are found in adult vocabulary. Finally, we compared the age of acquisition, imageability, and frequency characteristics of different grammatical categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). , new values of imageability are provided and values for age of acquisition, child written frequency, and adult written and spoken frequency are included. In this article, correlations among the variables are discussed and the words are grouped into grammatical categories. The results show that words acquired early have imageable referents, are frequently used in the texts read and written by elementary school children, and are frequent in adult written and spoken language. Nouns are acquired earlier and are more imageable than both verbs and adjectives. The composition in grammatical categories of the child's first vocabulary reflects the composition of adult vocabulary. The full set of these norms can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Frequency, not age of acquisition, affects Italian word naming

“…Words acquired relatively early in life tend to refer to concrete referents, and tend to be learned through direct, interactive experience with the corresponding object. Indeed, the first words acquired by young infants consist mainly of concrete, familiar, and highly imageable nouns (e.g., Bates, Bretherton, & Snyder, 1988;Rinaldi et al, 2004). Correlations between AoA and imageability or concreteness are usually higher than the correlations between AoA and adult word frequency Rubin, 1980;Whaley, 1978).…”

“…Child written frequency reflects the frequency with which a written word has been encountered in the first years of learning to read and write. Texts read and written by younger readers tend to include words that are learned before learning to read (Rinaldi, Barca, & Burani, 2004), with strong correlations which gradually decline with age (Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002). Thus word frequency drawn from texts for young readers may pick up possible effects of AoA on skilled performance (Bonin et al, 2004;Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002).…”

An acoustic investigation of the developmental trajectory of lexical stress contrastivity in Italian

“…Some have done so using the Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates Inventory (e.g., Caselli et al, 1995;D'Odorico et al, 2001;D'Odorico et al, 2011;Rinaldi et al, 2004;Zmarich et al, 2011 ), while other studies have used different methods (e.g., Gerosa et al, 2007;Zanobini et al, 2012;Zmarich and Bonifacio, 2005 ). None of these previous studies included examination of lexical stress.…”

Parents' child-directed communication and child language development: a longitudinal study with Italian toddlers

“…Five indices were analyzed for each noun produced by the mothers and fathers, as reported in Rinaldi, Barca and Burani (2004) for 519 Italian words. Five indices were analyzed for each noun produced by the mothers and fathers, as reported in Rinaldi, Barca and Burani (2004) for 519 Italian words.…”