University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2012 Oct;55(5):1265-73. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2012/10-0291). Epub 2012 Jan 31.
This research explored the impact of neighborhood density (ND), word frequency (WF), and word length (WL) on the vocabulary size of Danish-speaking children. Given the particular phonological properties of Danish, the impact was expected to differ from that reported in studies on English and French.
The monosyllabic words in the expressive lexicons of 894 Danish-speaking 2-year-old children were coded for ND, WF, and WL. Lexicons were extracted from parent checklists of the words spoken by their children.
Regression revealed that ND, WF, WL, and age together predicted 47% of the variance in vocabulary size, with ND, WF, WL, and age uniquely accounting for 39%, 3.2%, 2.2%, and 2.8% of that variance, respectively. Children with small vocabularies had learned words that were denser and more frequent in the ambient language, and those words were shorter than the words of children with larger vocabularies.
The 2 main findings were unexpected. The impact of ND for Danish-speaking children was not expected given the phonological properties of the language. The WF results differed from those of English because of the distribution of word classes on the language-relevant parent checklists. The strong role for ND in emerging languages found in other languages was replicated for Danish.
本研究探讨了邻里密度（ND）、单词频率（WF）和单词长度（WL）对丹麦语儿童词汇量的影响。鉴于丹麦语特殊的语音特性，预计其影响与英语和法语研究报告的影响不同。
对 894 名讲丹麦语的 2 岁儿童表达词汇中的单音节词进行了 ND、WF 和 WL 编码。词汇表是从父母检查清单中提取的，这些清单记录了孩子所说的单词。
回归分析显示，ND、WF、WL 和年龄共同预测了词汇量大小的 47%，其中 ND、WF、WL 和年龄分别独特地解释了 39%、3.2%、2.2%和 2.8%的方差。词汇量较小的儿童学习的单词在环境语言中密度更高、更频繁，而且这些单词比词汇量较大的儿童的单词更短。
这两个主要发现出乎意料。鉴于该语言的语音特性，丹麦语儿童 ND 的影响是出乎意料的。WF 的结果与英语不同，因为词类在与语言相关的父母检查表中的分布不同。在其他语言中发现的新兴语言中 ND 的强大作用在丹麦语中得到了复制。
