• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.245-271
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• 2017

This study aimed at investigating the lexical diversity in the "Frog Story" narratives of Korean-Chinese bilingual children. Six bilingual speakers of Korean children- four boys and two girls- were audio recorded as they produced narratives based on pictures from the Mercer Mayer book "Frog, where are you?" The order of narration was counterbalanced. The vocabularies from narratives were analyzed by type, token, TTR (type-token Ratio) and D value using the CLAN (Computerized Language Analysis) program. The findings showed that the pattern of lexical diversity in Korean is similar with the Chinese, but the TTR and D value of Chinese still remain low in comparison with those of Korean. In addition, Korean language seems to have significant influence on Chinese in the language usage pattern and vice versa.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.203-235
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• 2013

The goal of this paper is to test the findings about English-speaking children's acquisition of inflectional morphemes in the literature using a large-scale database. For this, we obtained a 4.7-million-word corpus from the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) database, and analyzed 1,630 British and American children's uses of English derivational morphemes up to age 7. We analyzed the type and token frequencies, type per token ratio (TTR), and the lexical diversity (D) for such inflectional morphemes as the present progressive -ing, the past tense -(e)d, the comparative and superlative -er/est with reference to children's nationality and age groups. To sum up our findings, the correlations between the D value and children's age varied from morpheme to morpheme; e.g. we found no correlation for -ing, a marginal correlation for -ed, and a strong correlation for -er/-est. Our findings are consistent with Brown's (1973) classical observation that children learn progressive forms earlier than the past tense marker. In addition, overgeneralization errors were frequently found for -ed, but rarely for -ing, showing a U-shaped developmental pattern at ages 2-3. Finally, American children showed higher D scores than British children, which showed that American children used inflectional morphemes for more word types compared with British children. The present study has its significance in testing the earlier findings in the literature by setting up well-defined methodology for analyzing the entire CHILDES database.