Article published in:
The Acquisition of Turkish in Childhood
Edited by Belma Haznedar and F. Nihan Ketrez
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 20] 2016
► pp. 57–78

Turkish children’s early vocabulary

A study on the lexical diversity of two sisters

| Middle East Technical University, Turkey
| Middle East Technical University, Turkey

This study examines the lexical development of two Turkish sisters (aged 1;4 and 2;3) and measures their lexical diversity in spontaneous production data. It suggests that the dependence of the TTR (type-to-token ratio) on the token size may indicate differential levels of lexical diversity. To measure the decrease in the TTR with respect to the increasing token size, it provides a method based on Herdan’s Log TTR. The noun TTR is found to be higher than the TTR of other lexical categories in the data, implying the prevalence of nouns in early lexicon until a sharp increase in the verb TTR around 2;3.

Keywords: lexical categories, type-to-token ratio (TTR), noun dominance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Assessing lexical diversity
    • 2.1Computing type-to-token ratio (TTR)
    • 2.2Common methods of measuring lexical diversity
    • 2.3Early lexical acquisition: The view from Turkish
  • 3.The current study
    • 3.1Participants and data
    • 3.2Transcription and coding procedures
    • 3.3Children’s lexicon sizes and measuring TTR across ages
      • 3.3.1Lexicon size: Descriptive statistics
      • 3.3.2TTRs with respect to age
    • 3.4Lexical diversity with respect to age: Herdan’s Log TTR
  • 4.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.20.03kay
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