title: Cross-linguistic analysis of vocabulary in young children: spanish, dutch, French, hebrew, italian, korean, and american english.
abstract: The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except for children just learning to talk), children's vocabularies contained relatively greater proportions of nouns than other word classes. Each word class was consistently positively correlated with every other class in each language and for children with smaller and larger vocabularies. Noun prevalence in the vocabularies of young children and the merits of several theories that may account for this pattern are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Child and Family Research, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD 20892-7971, USA. Marc_H_Bornstein@nih.gov
authors.forename: Marc H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Bornstein
authors.forename: Linda R
authors.initials: LR
authors.lastname: Cote
authors.forename: Sharone
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Maital
authors.forename: Kathleen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Painter
authors.forename: Sung-Yun
authors.initials: SY
authors.lastname: Park
authors.forename: Liliana
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Pascual
authors.forename: Marie-Germaine
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Pêcheux
authors.forename: Josette
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ruel
authors.forename: Paola
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Venuti
authors.forename: Andre
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vyt
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D003469:Culture; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014825:Vocabulary