Lexical Processing of Nouns and Verbs at 36 Months of Age Predicts Concurrent and Later Vocabulary and School Readiness

Abstract

Children's lexical processing speed at 18 to 25 months of age has been linked to concurrent and later language abilities. In the current study, we extend this finding to children aged 36 months. Children (N = 126) participated in a lexical processing task in which they viewed two static images on noun trials (e.g., an ear of corn and a hat), or two dynamic video clips on verb trials (e.g., a woman stretching and the same woman clapping), and heard an auditory prompt labeling one of them (e.g., "Where is she stretching?"). They also participated in standard assessments of language and school readiness. The results indicated that lexical processing speed (i.e., how long they required to look to the labeled image or scene) was associated with measures of concurrent receptive vocabulary, as well as receptive vocabulary and school readiness two years later, although the associations are weaker than for younger children.

Three-year-olds' comprehension of contrastive and descriptive adjectives: Evidence for contrastive inference

“…Instead, a broader conception of processing speed which encompasses the psycholinguistic and neural mechanics of pragmatic processing (as probed in our contrastive inference task) may be a more appropriate measure. Indeed, a recent study on the relationship between processing speed, vocabulary size, and subsequent vocabulary growth reveals a complex, dynamic, and variable interaction (Peter et al, 2019; see also Koenig, Arunachalam, & Saudino, 2020). Future work investigating the drivers of pragmatic inferencing should take this complexity into account.…”

“…Relatedly, we would welcome studies that test our findings in less controlled environments, e.g., during shared reading or free play. Because lab-based processing in preschoolers correlates well with vocabulary (Koenig et al, 2020), we would expect our results to generalise as long as the extra time affordances were retained.…”

Assessing receptive verb knowledge in late talkers and autistic children: Advances and cautionary tales

“…Indeed, Valleau et al (11) found no association between latency and vocabulary size in typically developing children under two years of age for verbs and dynamic scenes. However, age may also be a factor: Koenig et al (16) found that, for typically developing three-year-olds, latency correlated with vocabulary size on both noun and verb trials.…”

“…To begin to address these foundational gaps in our understanding of how eye gaze can be used to examine receptive verb vocabulary in children with language delays and disorders, we present two experiments that adapt tasks used by Valleau et al (11) and Koenig et al (16). Our goal is to explore how accuracy and processing speed measures may be adapted to accurately capture verb knowledge in children with language delays and disorders.…”

“…However, using dynamic scenes requires rethinking how eye gaze measures are operationalized because gaze behaviors differ when viewing dynamic scenes as compared to static images (e.g., 9). Few studies have used dynamic scenes to depict verbs, and among those that have, there is not a consensus on what eye gaze measures are best nor how they should be operationalized (6,(9)(10)(11)(16)(17)(18).…”