A Comparison of Preschool Children's Vocabulary and Corpus-Based Frequency Lists

The aim of this study, comparing 60 months and older pre-schoolers’ first most frequently used 1000 words with various corpus-based lists, is to reveal the extent to which the words used by preschool children in the language acquisition process differ from these lists. To determine the vocabulary levels of the children, interactive reading method was applied for eight weeks, any vocabulary produced by the children was recorded, a word pool was created, and thus a frequency list was obtained. In the study in which a holistic multi-case design was used, the frequency list of preschool children and the first 1000 words of A Frequency Dictionary of Turkish, which is a general corpus, the first 1000 words of Target Word List, the first 1000 words of a children's book, the first 1000 words of 1st grade Turkish textbooks, and the first 1000 words of primary school students were compared. As a result, the rate of differentiation between the first 1000 words of preschool children and the first 1000 words of the A Frequency Dictionary of Turkish, and the first 1000 words of the 1st Grade Turkish Book was found to be quite high while it was seen that there was less differentiation between the Target Word List, children's books, and the first 1000 words of primary school students.