Vocabulary Growth in Infancy and Toddlerhood: The Impact of COVID-19
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early vocabulary development is heavily influenced by children’s language environment. For example, higher SES children who have frequent and rich interactions with caregivers tend to have larger vocabulary size than lower SES children who have less stable home environment (e.g., Hoff & Naigles, 2002). Because of the recent pandemic, most Canadian children have experienced dramatic changes to their day-to-day life. In the current study, we ask whether the pandemic environment affects children’s vocabulary growth. We compare the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) scores of 11- to 34-month-olds collected before (N=1365) and after (N=301) the onset of COVID-19. Preliminary results show that CDI scores collected for toddlers after the pandemic onset are significantly lower than those collected before. We will continue to collect additional CDI data, and examine how factors such as screen time, reading time, SES, and number of people the child has regular interaction with mediate children’s vocabulary size.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".