Building vocabulary networks

Project Summary:
As children enter their second year of life, they experience rapid growth in their language knowledge which
includes substantial increase in vocabulary size and the speed of online word recognition. Yet, there is also
substantial variability in language skill during toddlerhood; 2-year-old children range from knowing a handful to
hundreds of words. Children that fall on the low end of this variability – frequently called Late-Talkers (LTs) –
are at increased risk for developing persistent language disorders, affecting their academic, social, and
professional lives. Recent evidence suggests that LTs experience not only delays in building a sizeable
vocabulary, but also show differences in the structure of their vocabularies. This project builds on this finding
by seeking to establish a mechanistic connection between building early vocabulary structure and subsequent
language growth by building word learning studies that are focused on building the individual structure of
children’s vocabulary by focusing on semantic linkages between words. We propose to recruit 18- to 27-month-old children with diverse language abilities (including those who are late-talking) and backgrounds who
take part in a series of experiments that probe how different types of individually tailored word learning tasks
lead to short-term growth in language processing skills and vocabulary growth over a period of three months.
This project advances theoretical accounts of early language learning and has high potential to inform early
intervention practices by establishing a causal link between toddlers’ existing semantic knowledge and their
growing language skills.

Grant Number: 1R21DC023392-01
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: Arielle Borovsky