Mandarin lexical development affected by the lexical characteristics of words : a longitudinal study

Abstract

Extensive research on the lexical characteristics being employed as statistical cues in early vocabulary development has been carried out on alphabetical languages, such as English and Dutch, in the past decade. This study examined the effect of phonological neighbourhood density with (PNDT) and without tone (PND), word length (WLPh), and word frequency (WF) in early vocabulary development of a Sino-Tibetan language, Mandarin. The mono- and di- syllabic words and nouns, verbs, adjectives in the expressive lexicons from a longitudinal language sample of a Mandarin-speaking child were matched with PNDT, PND, WF, and WLPh values. Regression analyses examined the amount of variance in vocabulary size that was accounted for by PNDT/PND, WF and WLPh. In the first regression with PNDT, WLPh, WF as the predictor variables, PNDT accounted for 55% in vocabulary size. In the second regression, with PND, WLPh, WF as the predictor variables, WLPh accounted for 45.8% of variance in vocabulary size. WF did not account for a significant amount of variance in vocabulary size in either regression. In addition, the phonological neighbourhood of words was observed to be denser early in development (smaller vocabulary size) and gradually became sparser across time (with an increase in vocabulary size).