Girls talk about dolls and boys about cars? Analyses of group and individual variation in Danish children’s first words
Posted by Callier Library on February 13, 2008
from First Language
Based on data from the Danish Longitudinal CDI study on 182 Danish children, we analyse aspects of variation in the children’s first 100 words (produced). First, we demonstrate the effect of gender and birth order (number of siblings) on acquisition times of first words by identifying single words which are significantly earlier in the productive repertoire of, for instance, girls versus boys. We also investigate the effect of the same factors on the composition of the vocabulary where the definition of categories (word classes) is based on the CDI’s thematic categorization. Finally, we investigate the individuality of the lexicon’s composition and find time-persistent differences between children for some word classes at this early stage.
