Replication data for: What makes a word easy to acquire? The effects of word class, frequency, imageability and phonological neighbourhood density on lexical development

The main dataset includes age of acquisition, vocabulary acquisition and two different sets of frequency data for words in the Norwegian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. In addition, a frequency list for child-directed speech based on two Norwegian CHILDES corpora is available in a separate file. Here, also words that do not occur in the CDI are listed, and counts from each corpora are given separately.
This paper asks how a set of psycholinguistic factors may account for children's lexical development. Age of acquisition is compared to a measure of lexical development based on vocabulary size rather than age, and robust regression models are used to assess the individual and joint effects on lexical development from word class, frequency, imageability and phonological neighbourhood density on Norwegian children’s early lexical development. The Norwegian Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) norms were used to calculate each CDI word’s age of acquisition and vocabulary size of acquisition. Lexical properties were downloaded from the lexical database Norwegian words, supplemented with data on frequency in adult and child-directed speech. Age of acquisition correlated highly with vocabulary size of acquisition, but the new measure was more evenly distributed and more sensitive to lexical effects. Frequency in child-directed speech was the most important predictor of lexical development, followed by imageability, which seems to account for the dominance of nominals over predicates in Norwegian.

本数据集主要包含词汇习得年龄、词汇量习得以及挪威版 MacArthur-Bates 沟通发展评估表（CDI）中词汇的两种不同频率数据集。此外，基于挪威 CHILDES 语料库的儿童导向性语言频率列表作为单独的文件提供。在此，还包括了未在 CDI 中出现的词汇，并分别给出了每个语料库的计数。本文旨在探讨一系列心理语言学因素如何解释儿童的词汇发展。词汇习得年龄与基于词汇量而非年龄的词汇发展测量值进行比较，并利用稳健的回归模型评估词类、频率、可形象性和语音邻域密度对挪威儿童早期词汇发展的个体和联合影响。挪威沟通发展评估表（CDI）标准被用于计算每个 CDI 词汇的习得年龄和习得词汇量。词汇属性从挪威词汇数据库下载，并补充了成人及儿童导向性语言中的频率数据。词汇习得年龄与习得词汇量高度相关，但新的测量值分布更为均匀，对词汇效应更为敏感。儿童导向性语言中的频率是词汇发展的最重要预测因素，其次是可形象性，这似乎解释了挪威中名词优于谓词的现象。