Models of Vocabulary Acquisition: Direct Tests and Text-Derived Simulations of Vocabulary Growth

Abstract

Determining word meanings that ought to be taught or introduced is important for educators. A sequence for vocabulary growth can be inferred from many sources, including testing children’s knowledge of word meanings at various ages, predicting from print frequency, or adult-recalled Age of Acquisition. A new approach, Word Maturity, is based on applying Latent Semantic Analysis to patterns of word occurrences in texts used with children. This article reports substantial correlations in the .67 to .74 range between Word Maturity estimates and the ages of acquiring word meanings from two studies of children’s knowledge of word meanings, controlling for homographs. The agreement among these markedly different methods for determining when word meanings are understood opens up new research avenues. In addition, we have found that print frequency is associated with Word Maturity and tested knowledge of word meanings and that understanding concrete meanings required less print frequency exposure than verbally defined meanings.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported in part by Pearson PLC. We acknowledge constructive suggestions from the anonymous reviewers. They alerted us to important issues that we needed to consider and in so doing have helped improve the article.

Notes

1. ¹Another meaning of match, to be the same, is not given in LWV.

2. ²We acknowledge Jack Stenner and MetaMetrics for the use of their corpus.

3. ³In the case of TTM × Average Percent Correct, the correlation is negative—words with higher percentages correct relate to lower TTM or LWV grade levels.