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Size estimation of lexicon directed to Italian preschool children via a frequencies-of-frequencies approach
 

Size estimation of lexicon directed to Italian preschool children via a frequencies-of-frequencies approach

S Costantini, P Pasqualetti, P Rinaldi, D Chiarella, M Favilla, M Majorano, Lorenzo Spreafico L Tardella
Statistical Science: From Theory to Applied Research III, pp.62-68
Italian Statistical Society Series on Advances in Statistics, Springer
2026
:
https://hdl.handle.net/10863/53230
frequency-of-frequencies lexicon size estimation
The words that children hear play a crucial role in the development of the vocabulary they can understand and use in communication. In this work, we aim to study the size of the lexicon to which Italian preschool children are exposed. We constructed a corpus of 224 diverse sources (children’s books, songs, cartoons, and parentchild interactions, comprising about 450,000 occurrences) and applied non-parametric frequency-of-frequencies (FoF) estimators of the latent lexicon size. Our results indicate that the Italian child-directed lexicon comprises at least 20,000 lemmas.

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url
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-30881-8_11
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