Mandarin vocabulary development is affected by the lexical characteristics of words

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of phonological neighbourhood density (PND), word frequency (WF) and word length (WL) on lexical acquisition in Mandarin-speaking children. 657 Mandarin-speaking children aged between 16-30 months from Beijing were selected from Wordbank and results from the Mandarin version of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Index (MMCDI) were obtained to generate the vocabulary scores. There were significant correlations between PND, WF, WL and total vocabulary size in children. PND and WF had strong, moderately significant negative correlations and WL showed a strong, significant positive correlation with total vocabulary size in children. In multiple regression using the forward method, PND and age contributed unique variance of 65.8% and 7.6% respectively to the prediction of total vocabulary size in the typically developing group. For the late talker group, age and PNDT accounted for 61.1% and 12.5% of variance in predicting total vocabulary scores respectively. Unlike Cantonese, English and other languages, there was no significant difference between the LT group and TD group in the values of age, PNDT, WFT and WL in Mandarin-speaking children. And PND remained a significant predictor of vocabulary size in typically developing Mandarin-speaking children like English populations.