Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examines convergence between parental reports and behavioral measures in assessing early word knowledge of twenty-eight 14-month-old Korean infants. We compared infants' word recognition patterns with parental reports using full and shorter versions of the Korean MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MCDI-K). Our analyses revealed three key patterns. First, while parents showed consistent judgment between the full CDI and the target-word checklist, the checklist demonstrated better convergence with eye-tracking measures, which accounted for baseline looking biases. Second, parents' reporting accuracy varied systematically with item difficulty: for early-acquired words, parents showed higher agreement with eye-tracking than for later-acquired words. Third, exploratory analyses suggested a possible asymmetry in word category recognition, with infants showing stronger recognition of nouns than verbs in the eye-tracking task, contrasting with more balanced verb-noun knowledge in parental reports. These findings show that assessment methods capture different aspects of early word knowledge.