Which words are easier? Predicting tablet word comprehension results from corpus data

CRISTIA, ALEJANDRINA; SCAFF,C.; ROSEMBERG, CELIA RENATA; STEIN, ALEJANDRA; ALAM FLORENCIA

Paris

Workshop; Workshop Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psicolinguistique; 2017

Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psicolinguistique, École Normale Superieure

Previous studies have showed that not all words are equally easy to learn. Abstract words are comprehended later than concrete words (Bergelson & Swingley, 2013). Also, words frequently heard in isolation are reportedly comprehended earlier (Brent & Siskind, 2001). Differences across word classes have been also found- e.g., in English, nouns produced (accurately) earlier than verbs. However no such difference were found in Korean (Choi & Gopnik, 1995). The present work focus on studying the effects of lexical features on word comprehension in toddlers. To answer this question we use the results of a touchscreen vocabulary test and collapse the results of 118 3 year old children as our dependent measure and frequency in the input, word type and concreteness of the word as our predictors. The results showed that neither the frequency in the input, nor the word type or concretness could predict the difficulty in the comprehension