Lee, S. 1 , Jun, J. 2 , Min, M. 2 & Suh, J. 2
1 Cyber Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
2 Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
The study deals with the whole data set of the corpus of typically-developing English children in CHILDES database including a total of 8,042 transcripts. The purpose of this study is to reorganize the data set in order to create a useful way of using the big data and to reexamine the findings of previous studies regarding English children's acquisition of vocabulary and inflectional morphemes with the increased statistical power. The first stage of the project was to rearrange the whole data set by children's age and to find children's developmental pattern of vocabulary by counting word frequency, inflected word frequency, type/token ratios, etc. and syntactic development by calculating MLU by age and compare the results with mother's in order to find out a possible input frequency effect. The data were also compared between the US and the UK children and mothers. The 8,042 transcripts included 2,272 UK transcripts with 1,355 morphologically tagged, and 5,770 USA transcripts with 2,363 morphologically tagged from 265 one-year olds, 406 two-year olds, 371 three-year olds, 228 four-year olds, 162 five-year olds, 95 six-year olds, 103 seven-year olds, 59 eight-year olds, 40 nine-year olds, 58 ten-year olds, 8 eleven-year olds, one 12-year-old one, and one 16-year-old one. The findings were (i) Type/token ratio increased by children?s age and the similar pattern was also found with mothers; (ii) There was an overlap between children's and mothers? data in terms of the most frequent words and inflected words; and (iii) Children's MLUs increased till age 6 (with 5.65) whereas mother?s MLU started from 4.40, increasing till age 4 (with 5.40), and UK mothers's and children's MLUs were slightly shorter than the US mothers' and children's at each age. The findings suggest a possible influence of input frequency on the children's acquisition of vocabulary and MLU development.