Bates E, Marchman V, Thal D, Fenson L, Dale P, Reznick J S, Reilly J, Hartung J
Center for Research in Language, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla 92093-0526.
J Child Lang. 1994 Feb;21(1):85-123. doi: 10.1017/s0305000900008680.
Results are reported for stylistic and developmental aspects of vocabulary composition for 1,803 children and families who participated in the tri-city norming of a new parental report instrument, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. We replicate previous studies with small samples showing extensive variation in use of common nouns between age 0; 8 and 1;4 (i.e. 'referential style'), and in the proportion of vocabulary made up of closed-class words between 1;4 and 2;6 (i.e. 'analytic' vs. 'holistic' style). However, both style dimensions are confounded with developmental changes in the composition of the lexicon, including three 'waves' of reorganization: (I) an initial increase in percentage of common nouns from 0 to 100 words, followed by a proportional decrease; (2) a slow linear increase in verbs and other predicates, with the greatest gains taking place between 100 and 400 words; (3) no proportional development at all in the use of closed-class vocabulary between 0 and 400 words, followed by a sharp increase from 400 to 680 words. When developmental changes in noun use are controlled, referential-style measures do not show the association with developmental precocity reported in previous studies, although these scores are related to maternal education. By contrast, when developmental changes in grammatical function word use are controlled, high closed-class scores are associated with a slower rate of development. We suggest that younger children may have less perceptual acuity and/or shorter memory spans than older children with the same vocabulary size. As a result, the younger children may ignore unstressed function words until a later point in development while the older children tend to reproduce perceptual details that they do not yet understand. Longitudinal data show that early use of function words (under 400 words) is not related to grammatical levels after the 400-word point, confirming our 'stylistic' interpretation of early closed-class usage. We close with recommendations for the unconfounding of stylistic and developmental variance in research on individual differences in language development, and provide look-up tables that will permit other investigators to pull these aspects apart.
本文报告了1803名儿童及其家庭在参与一项新的家长报告工具——麦克阿瑟交流发展量表的三城市常模制定过程中，词汇构成在文体和发展方面的结果。我们重复了之前对小样本的研究，结果显示，在0;8至1;4岁之间（即“指称风格”），普通名词的使用存在广泛差异；在1;4至2;6岁之间（即“分析性”与“整体性”风格），封闭类词在词汇中所占比例也存在差异。然而，这两个风格维度都与词汇构成的发展变化相互混淆，包括三个“重组波”：（1）普通名词百分比从0到100个单词时最初增加，随后成比例下降；（2）动词和其他谓语呈缓慢线性增长，在100到400个单词之间增长最大；（3）在0到400个单词之间，封闭类词汇的使用没有成比例发展，随后从400到680个单词急剧增加。当控制名词使用的发展变化时，指称风格测量结果并未显示出与之前研究中报道的发展早熟之间的关联，尽管这些分数与母亲的教育程度有关。相比之下，当控制语法功能词使用的发展变化时，高封闭类分数与较慢的发展速度相关。我们认为，与词汇量相同的大龄儿童相比，年幼儿童可能感知敏锐度较低和/或记忆跨度较短。因此，年幼儿童可能会忽略无重音的功能词，直到发育后期，而大龄儿童则倾向于再现他们尚未理解的感知细节。纵向数据表明，功能词的早期使用（400个单词以下）与400个单词之后的语法水平无关，这证实了我们对早期封闭类词使用的“文体”解释。我们最后针对语言发展个体差异研究中如何区分文体和发展差异提出了建议，并提供了查找表，以便其他研究人员能够区分这些方面。
