Qualitative aspects of productive vocabulary at the 200-and 500-word stages - A comparison between spontaneous speech and parental report data

Sep 29, 2026

This paper compares the proportions of different word classes in 30 Italian children at the 200- and 500-word stages of vocabulary development. It uses the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory and spontaneous speech samples gathered during an observation session to assess whether the children’s vocabulary compositions differ quantitatively across methods. Both approaches show a higher presence of nouns than other word classes, with significant noun/other-class proportion differences.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages13

Reading Time33 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Vocabulary development stages and universal biases

Methodological sources and measurement differences

Parental checklists versus spontaneous speech

Potential biases in checklist data

ARTICLE FIRST LANGUAGE Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) [www.sagepublications.com Vol](www.sagepublications.com Vol) 27(1): 075–087 (200702) DOI: 10. 1177/0142723707067545 Qualitative aspects of productive vocabulary at the 200-and 500-word stages: A comparison between spontaneous speech and parental report data Nicoletta Salerni, University of Milan-Bicocca Alessandra Assanelli, University of Milan-Bicocca Laura D’Odorico, University of Milan-Bicocca Germano Rossi, University of Milan-Bicocca ABSTRACT This paper compares the proportions of different word classes present in 30 Italian children at two specific stages of vocabulary development (200 and 500 words) . The Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory and spontaneous speech samples produced during an observation session were both used to examine the extent to which these children produce quantitatively different vocabulary compositions. Both methods revealed a greater presence of nouns than other word classes in the sample studied, although significant differences were found in the noun/other word class proportions. KEYWORDS Language checklist; lexicon composition; methodological comparison; spontaneous speech; vocabulary development FIRST LANGUAGE VOLUME 27 ISSUE 1 INTRODUCTION The study and identification of universal biases in early lexical learning is an important source of information for improving our understanding of initial conceptual and perceptual predispositions involved in the language acquisition process. A number of studies have documented the occurrence of recurring discrepancies in the order of appearance and frequency of different classes of words. A common finding is that content words form the basis of the one-word stage and first word combinations in the speech of the majority of children, while closed-class words and inflectional markers usually appear at a later stage. Moreover, it is now widely accepted that within the open-class category, nouns referring to objects are acquired before verbsand other content words, and constitute the predominant lexical category in the earliest stages of language development (Bates, Marchman, Thal, Fenson, et al., 1994; Caselli, Bates, Casadio, Fenson, et al., 1995; Dromi, 1987; Goldfield, 1993) . Recently however, the publication of new data collected in studies of Korean-and Mandarin-speaking children, which show that verbs and nouns are acquired contemporaneously (Choi & Gopnik, 1995; Tardif, 1996), has reopened the question of the existence of a universal noun bias in children’s early productive vocabulary. This difference may be due to the type of methodology used; in fact, studies on children’s early lexical development have been based, for the most part, on a variety of data derived either from maternal checklists or diaries or spontaneous production. Different measures of vocabulary composition have also been used to support the numerical importance of object words in children’s early vocabularies. Although sometimes these different measures have been considered to be more or less equivalent, it is possible that different methods of data collection provide different measures concerning the relative and absolute proportions of particular word classes in children’s early lexicons, even though the measures themselves can be correlated with each other to a great extent (Pine, Lieven & Rowland, 1996) . In this regard, some studies seem to suggest that there may be systematic quantitative differences between observational, diary and checklist measures of vocabulary composition. Bloom, Tinker & Margulis (1993), for example, maintain that observational measures tend to underestimate the proportion of common nouns in children’s vocabularies compared with maternal reports. Pine (1992), too, found systematic quantitative differences between maternal diaries and observational measures of vocabulary composition du

FAQs

What is the main comparison in the study?

The study compares how different word classes are represented at the 200- and 500-word stages using spontaneous speech versus parental report data from the CDI.

How many Italian children are included and at which stages are they assessed?

The paper examines 30 Italian children at two specific vocabulary development stages: 200 and 500 word production.

What general pattern do both methods find regarding word classes?

Both methods reveal a greater presence of nouns than other word classes, though the noun versus other-class proportions differ significantly.

Sep 29, 2026

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