Słownictwo dzieci w wieku przedszkolnym. Dwa pokolenia – dwa światy

The main subject area of this study is intergenerational confrontation of the lexical resource of pre-school children. The two generations in question are “parents”, that is people who were children in the period 1980–1983, and “children”, which is the generation of pre-schoolers in the period 2010–2015. Frequency dictionaries were developed for both generations on the basis of corpora of spontaneous utterances of children. A comparative overview of both lists permits identification of strictly quantitative changes (the dictionary of 2015 contains ca. 1,000 entries more than the previous one) as well as ones related to social conventions and development of civilisation, which are useful in thorough linguistic and psycholinguistic research. This is the basis for indication of two children’s worlds separated from each other with a thirty years’ generational caesura, detection of (lexical and grammatical) linguistic creation areas. What is common for both frequency lists is the regularity consisting in the fact that the list of ten most frequent entries (usually synsemantic words) constitutes ca. 25% of all that were used in samples of 100 thousand, which is the so-called text coverage percentage.