Lexical diversity and productivity in French preschoolers: developmental, gender and sociocultural factors

Abstract

In this study, we examined the influence of child gender and sociocultural (SCL) factors in language production. Subjects were French Parisian children in nine age groups (24, 27, 30, 33, 36, 39, 42, 45 and 48 months). A total of 316 language samples were recorded during a 20‐min standardized play session. Measures of grammatical and lexical development included Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and word type and token—specifically, grammatical words such as determiners, prepositions and pronouns as well as verbs. ANOVAs revealed strong influences of SCL, with children from high SCL families showing more complex lexical productions and a higher rate of development. These observations suggest that amount of exposure to language accounts for this differential rate of acquisition. Analyses also revealed a general effect of gender, showing a small advantage in language production for girls over boys until 36 months of age.

• Sociocultural
• gender
• preschoolers
• French language
• lexical diversity
• MLU

Notes

1. POST is based on a Markov model of the resolution of ambiguous biclass succession rules. POST uses a training phase on already tagged data and permits carrying out detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses. POST works well with positional or semi‐positional languages such as French or English (see Parisse & Le Normand, 2000a, b).