A naturalistic study of early lexical development: General processes and inter-individual variations in French children

• Published in: First language Vol. 25; no. 1; pp. 67 - 101
• Main Authors: Bassano, Dominique, Eme, Pascale-Elsa, Champaud, Christian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Thousand Oaks, CA Sage Publications 01-02-2005; SAGE Publications
• Subjects: Humanities and Social Sciences; Psychology; French; lexical development; Cross-linguistic variation; naturalistic production; noun-verb asynchrony; inter-individual variation; grammatical explosion; crosslingustic variation; interindividual variation
• ISSN: 0142-7237; 1740-2344
• DOI: 10.1177/0142723705049119

This study investigated early lexical development in French by analysing changes and
variability in lexical production and composition of children’s
spontaneous speech samples from three age groups: 1;8, 2;6 and 3;3 years (20
children in each). Analyses of general developmental changes showed that lexical
productivity increased strongly between 1;8 and 2;6 and between 2;6 and 3;3. Changes
in lexical composition mostly occurred between 1;8 and 2;6, indicating that the most
important reorganizations are achieved by 2;6. The main changes observed (decreases
in proportions of nouns and paralexical classes, and increases in proportions of
predicate and grammatical classes) fit overall the developmental trajectories found
for other languages, such as English and Italian. Two controversial issues were
particularly examined and discussed with regard to cognitive, language-specific and
methodological factors: noun-verb asynchrony and grammatical word explosion.
Quantitative individual differences in lexical composition were greater at 1;8 than
at 2;6 and 3;3, supporting the hypothesis that stylistic variation decreases in the
course of the third year. Children’s lexical profiles were strikingly
diversified at 1;8, whereas they appeared as variants of a same
‘grammatical profile’ at 2;6 and 3;3. We propose that the
decline of stylistic variations reflects the impact of developmental constraints,
such as the necessity for children to produce function words, which suggests that
variations found in the youngest children are not determinant factors for subsequent
lexical development.