Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Why do children learn some words before others? Understanding individual variability across children and also variabilityacross words, may be informative of the learning processes that underlie language learning. We investigated item-basedvariability in vocabulary development using lexical properties of distributional statistics derived from a large corpus ofchild-directed speech. Unlike previous analyses, we predicted word trajectories cross-sectionally, shedding light on trendsin vocabulary development that may not have been evident at a single time point. We also show that whether one looksat a single age group or across ages as a whole, the best distributional predictor is whether a child knows a word is thenumber of other known words with which that that word tends to co-occur.