The relation between phonological and lexical development in French-speaking children.
Margaret Kehoe, Tamara Patrucco-Nanchen, Margaret Friend and 1 others
PMID 30183387WHAT IT FOUND
French-speaking children with smaller vocabularies at age 2.5 rely heavily on words with many sound neighbours and simpler phonetic structures.
They also have poorer non-word repetition and fewer consonants in their speech. These phonological factors explain 76% of the variance in vocabulary size.
Key findings
01Neighbourhood density (the number of words that differ by one sound) was the strongest predictor of vocabulary size, accounting for 57% of unique variance.
02Children with smaller vocabularies selected words with higher neighbourhood density and lower phonetic complexity compared to children with larger vocabularies.
03Phonological production skills, specifically the number of consonants in syllable-initial positions, accounted for an additional 8% of unique variance in vocabulary size.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot determine if poor phonological skills cause small vocabularies or if small vocabularies limit phonological development. Four children did not complete the non-word repetition task, and their data was imputed, which may affect the reliability of memory-related findings. The sample size is relatively small (n=40), limiting the generalisability of the findings to other populations or languages. The study only included French-speaking children, so the specific phonological factors (like syllable-initial importance) may not apply to English-speaking patients.
Declared interests
The authors report no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume this study proves that phonological training will increase vocabulary size. The design is observational and correlational, so it shows that these factors are linked but does not demonstrate that changing one will cause the other to change.