Robustness of Word Comprehension in 18-20-month-old Norwegian Toddlers

Abstract

Infants use a range of cues to map words to the world around them, such as shape, familiarity, frequency or context of use, and when these cues are not available, they typically fail to disambiguate between competing referents. This suggests that representations for specific words might not yet be firmly grounded in their lexicon, and certain conditions need to be met to reveal comprehension. This impreciseness of early word representations sets challenges for the validity of parental reports of children’s word comprehension, such as the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI), a widely used measure in both language research and clinical practice. The current pre-registered study set out to explore both the robustness of early word comprehension and the validity of such parental reports. Sixty 18-20-month-old Norwegian toddlers performed a touch-based forced-choice word recognition task, in which they were prompted to identify the labelled target out of two displayed items on a touchscreen tablet. In each trial, the distractor item was either semantically related (e.g., dog-cat) or unrelated (e.g., dog-airplane) to the target, and we compared toddlers’ accuracy in identifying the target to their parents’ reports of comprehension on the CDI. The results show that toddlers are marginally more accurate in the semantically unrelated condition, are biased towards animate items, and that parents are relatively reliable, but tend to underestimate their children’s word comprehension. We also present, to the best of our knowledge, the first evidence of the efficacy of remote data collection of word recognition with a developmental sample, through comparable results from both in-lab and online administration of our recognition task