In this study, the authors examined the impact of a vocabulary intervention designed to support vocabulary depth, or the building of semantic networks, in preschool children (n = 30). The authors further investigated the effect of specific instructional strategies on growth in vocabulary depth. The intervention employed shared book reading and…

In this study, the authors examined the impact of a vocabulary intervention designed to support vocabulary depth, or the building of semantic networks, in preschool children (n = 30). The authors further investigated the effect of specific instructional strategies on growth in vocabulary depth. The intervention employed shared book reading and…

Well-developed lexical representations are important for reading comprehension, but there have been no prior attempts to track growth in the depth of knowledge of particular words. This article examines increases in depth of vocabulary knowledge in 4-5-year-old preschool students (n = 240) who participated in a vocabulary intervention that taught…

This longitudinal study examined the predictive validity of the MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventories-Short Form (CDI-SF), a parent report questionnaire about children's language development (Fenson, Pethick, Renda, Cox, Dale & Reznick, 2000). Data were first gathered from parents on the CDI-SF vocabulary scores for seventy-six…

Thirty children with a mean length of utterance ranging from 1.00 to 4 and an age range of 1.7 to 5.5 were tested for comprehension of two-noun possessive phrases. Three types of possessive relationships were used to uncover children's knowledge of the semantics and syntax of English possession. (Author/AM)

Six experiments examined how children approach the task of learning novel count nouns. Findings indicated that three- and four-year olds function with an antithematic bias and that children do not reliably extend novel count nouns to subordinate exemplars when perceptual similarity is controlled until about age 7. (MDM)