ERIC Number: EJ1453952
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Nov
Pages: 11
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: EISSN-1469-7602
Frequent vs. Infrequent Words Shape Toddlers' Real-Time Sentence Comprehension
Christine E. Potter; Casey Lew-Williams
Journal of Child Language, v51 n6 p1478-1488 2024
We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children's real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames ("Look at the…" vs. "Examine the…"), followed by nouns that were higher- or lower-frequency labels for a referent ("horse" vs. "pony"). Toddlers showed no significant differences in comprehension of nouns in typical and atypical sentence frames. However, they were less accurate in recognizing lower-frequency nouns, particularly among toddlers with smaller vocabularies. We conclude that toddlers can recognize nouns in diverse sentence contexts, but their representations develop gradually.
Descriptors: Child Language, Toddlers, Word Frequency, Sentences, Comprehension, Language Processing, English, Nouns, Accuracy, Word Recognition, Vocabulary Development
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
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