Children Encounter Rich Language Input Through Video Media

Recent corpus studies suggest that vocabulary in children’s books is more complex than vocabulary in day-to-day conversations (Montag et al., 2015; Dawson et al., 2021). Less is known about the language of children’s video media, a highly prevalent source of language input for young children. In this study we compare the Children’s Corpus of Video Media (CCVM: a specialised corpus of videos popular among UK pre-schoolers; ~233,000 words) to a large database of child-directed speech (CDS; ~2,589,000 words). Compared to CDS, the vocabulary in the CCVM is more diverse, sophisticated, and richer in meaning. Words that are distinctive of video language have a higher age of acquisition than CDS words, but do not differ in concreteness. These findings support the theory that rich vocabulary may arise from narrative formats, and so, like book language, video media may provide rich lexical input for young children.