Comparability of lexical corpora: word frequency in phonological generalization

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Statistical regularities in language offer insights into language acquisition.
• Methodological concerns exist regarding the use of adult corpora data for child language research.
• The applicability of adult speech patterns to developing linguistic systems is debated.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the comparability of lexical corpora in explaining word frequency effects on children's phonological generalization.
• To validate the use of different types of corpora (child/adult, written/spoken) for child language research.

Main Methods:

• Evaluation of four distinct word frequency corpora.
• Post-hoc analysis of existing phonological generalization data from two preschool children.
• Comparison of corpus data across child/adult and written/spoken sources.

Main Results:

• Corpus interpretation of phonological generalization remained consistent across children and corpora.
• Phonological gains were more pronounced for low-frequency words compared to high-frequency words.
• The choice of corpus did not alter the interpretation of generalization patterns.

Conclusions:

• Lexical corpora are comparable for analyzing word frequency effects on phonological generalization in children.
• Findings support the use of corpora in probabilistic language acquisition studies.
• Results have implications for designing effective clinical language intervention programs.