Krzysztof Fronczyk

What do parents know about their children’s vocabulary? A questionnaire/checklist study of lexical development in children aged 2–6

The paper presents a study on lexical development of Polish children aged 2–6. Three tools were constructed for this purpose: “The Child Lexicon Development Questionnaire/Checklist”, “The Questionnaire: Communication and Family Routines“ and a personal questionnaire. All were filled in by children’s parents. The first tool comprised nouns, verbs and adjectives drawn in a layered drawing from the Frequency List of Polish Language Corpus (PWN, 2004). The next two consisted of questions related to interactions in the family, social environment and family SES. Data from 148 children were analyzed. Results revealed non-linear lexical growth with age, positive impact of diversified interactions with parents as well as of a number of different games/play situations with peers on children’s vocabulary. Interactions with parents mainly affected noun and adjective vocabulary, while the number of plays with peers affected verb vocabulary.

Assessment of vocabulary size – a new tool for testing preschool children

The paper presents the first phase of research aimed at the construction of Picture Vocabulary Test (part I – Comprehension; OTS-R). Development of a mental lexicon is one of the basic components of linguistic and communicative competence (Michnick-Golinkoff et al., 2000; Hall and Waxman, 2004). Vocabulary size affects other aspects of language acquisition e.g. grammar (Dale et al., 2000; Dionne et al., 2003). Presented measure aims at the assessing word comprehension in preschool Polish children. In this phase of research, 351 children (age 2–6) took part in the study. Word comprehension was assessed by a picture choice task. Children were presented with a series of four pictures charts, each containing pictures depicting a target word (noun, verb, or adjective) and three distractors related to the target word phonetically, semantically, and thematically. Results show a gradual increase of vocabulary with age, better understanding of verbs over nous and adjectives, and a greater proportion of semantic errors over the other two types of errors. The study enabled the preparation of a new version of assessment tool which is going to be used in the subsequent phase of the research (norming study).