Exploring patterns of stability and change in caregivers’ word usage across early childhood

The linguistic input children receive across early childhood plays a crucial role in shaping their knowledge about the world. To study this input, researchers have begun applying distributional semantic models to large corpora of child-directed speech, extracting various patterns of word use/co-occurrence. Previous work using these models has not measured how these patterns may change throughout development, however. In this work, we leverage NLP methods – originally developed to study historical language change – to compare caregivers’ use of words when talking to younger vs. older children. Some words’ usage changed more than others’; this variability could be predicted based on the word’s properties at both the individual and category level. These findings suggest that caregivers’ changing patterns of word use may play a role in scaffolding children’s acquisition of conceptual structure in early development