The ability to judge the limits of one's own knowledge may play an important role in knowledge acquisition. The current study tested the prediction that preschoolers would judge the limits of their lexical knowledge more accurately if they were first exposed to a few objects of contrasting familiarity. Such preexposure was hypothesized to increase…

A word learning paradigm was used to teach children novel words that varied in phonotactic probability and neighborhood density. The effects of frequency and density on speech production were examined when phonetic forms were nonreferential (i.e., when no referent was attached) and when phonetic forms were referential (i.e., when a referent was…

The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of prosodic stress patterns and semantic depth on word learning. Twelve preschool-aged children with typically developing speech and language skills participated in a word learning task. Novel words with either a trochaic or iambic prosodic pattern were embedded in one of two learning…