The relation between phonological and lexical development in French-speaking children

This study examines the relation between lexical and phonological variables in 40 French-speaking children, aged 2;5. Specifically, it examines the influence of phonetic complexity, phonological production, phonological memory and neighbourhood density (ND) on vocabulary size. Children were divided into four groups on the basis of their scores on the French version of the Communicative Developmental Inventory (CDI): late1 (< 10%ile), late2 (15-25%ile), middle (40-60%ile) and precocious (> 90%ile). The children's lexicons were coded in terms of phonetic complexity and ND (one-and two-syllable words), and their production capacities were determined from measuring percent consonants correct (PCC) and the number of syllable-initial (C_SI) and -final (C_SF) consonants in their phonetic inventories. The children also took part in a non-word repetition (NWR) task. Results indicated significant group differences in all four sets of variables. Children with larger vocabularies selected words with greater phonetic complexity and with lower ND values. They had superior PCC, C_SI and NWR scores compared to children with smaller vocabularies. Linear regression analyses indicated that 76% of variance in vocabulary size could be accounted for by ND in combination with phonetic complexity and C_SI. Our findings are consistent with previous studies which show that ND plays an important role in accounting for variance in vocabulary size. They also indicate that phonetic complexity and phonological production influence lexical acquisition.