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Infants' Knowledge of Individual Words: Investigating Links Between Parent Report and Looking Time

Authors: López Pérez MMoore CSander-Montant AByers-Heinlein K


Affiliations

1 Concordia University, Montréal, Canada.

Description

Assessing early vocabulary development commonly involves parent report methods and behavioral tasks like looking-while-listening. While both yield reliable aggregate scores, findings are mixed regarding their reliability in measuring infants' knowledge of individual words. Using archival data from 126 monolingual and bilingual 14-31-month-olds, we further examined links across these methods at the word level, while controlling for potentially confounding child-level factors. When data were averaged at the child level, performance on the looking-while-listening task correlated well with parent-reported word production of the same words, as expected. However, mixed-effects model comparisons suggested that at the word level, looking-while-listening performance was significantly predicted by age and total productive vocabulary, but not by parent-reported knowledge of a word once these factors were controlled for. These findings invite careful consideration regarding the adequacy of these two popular methods for capturing children's idiosyncratic knowledge of individual words.


Keywords: CDIbilingualismindividual word knowledgelooking‐while‐listeningvocabulary development


Links

PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39639457/

DOI: 10.1111/infa.12641