The relationship between Cantonese lexical development and (sub)lexical characteristics

Abstract

This study investigated the lexical and sublexical characteristics, including word frequency (WF), phonological neighbourhood density (PND) and word length (WL), of a huge sample of Cantonese-speaking children. Parents of 989 Cantonese-speaking children aged from 24 to 30 months completed the Cantonese version of the MacAurthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory : Words and Sentences (CCDI; Tardif, Fletcher, Liang, & Kaciroti, 2009). Words from CCDI were coded for PND, WF and WL. The relationships among vocabulary of the children, PND, WF and WL were examined. Children were classified into typically developing (TD) and late talker (LT) group and the PND and WF values of their vocabulary were compared. Results showed that PND and WF were both strong predictors of children’s lexicons. PND accounted for 62.7% of the variance in the size of vocabulary and WF also accounted for 8.2% of the variance in vocabulary size. Lexicons of children with small vocabulary size consisted of words that have high PND and high WF in Cantonese. This indicated that Cantonese-speaking children could extract statistical properties of the language in the environment, for both typically developing children and late talkers.