Assessment of two-year-olds' (N=22) acquisition of words for referents of previously learned words indicated that young children found it easier to learn a new word when they were able to contrast its referent with that of a word they already knew. (Author/CB)

Three experiments investigated the processes by which 2-year-olds acquire the language to express category hierarchies. The first experiment studied how children use current linguistic knowledge to constrain the potential meanings of new words. This experiment compared interpretations of new words given to objects the children could already name…

There are problems in interpreting the naming behavior of children. Children may misname a word because the word is absent from their vocabulary, because it is not yet firmly established, or because of a word retrieval or lexical assessing problem. Preliminary results are reported of an experimental technique designed to account for these…

Children's pronunciations of vowel clusters in synthetic words were analyzed in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. Subjects were 436 elementary-school students of both high and low reading levels from a suburban, an urban, and a rural community. Independent variables were grade level, sex, reading level, community…

Children's pronunciations of vowel clusters in synthetic words were analyzed in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. Subjects were 436 elementary students of both high and low reading levels from a suburban, an urban, and a rural community. Conclusions of the study, reported in Part 2, were (1) pronunciations more…

Children's pronunciations of vowel clusters in synthetic words were analyzed in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. Subjects were 436 elementary students of both high and low reading levels from a suburban, an urban, and a rural community. Discussion of the problem and procedures of the study are found in Part 1,…

To study whether metalinguistic benefits of childhood bilingualism flow on to reading acquisition, word awareness skills were developed in one group of monolingual English children and in another "marginal bilingual" group. Results strengthen the argument for a causal role in reading acquisition for word awareness. (Contains 63…

Three studies investigated how 24-month-olds and adults resolve temporary ambiguity in fluent speech when encountering prenominal adjectives potentially interpretable as nouns. Children were tested in a looking-while-listening procedure to monitor the time course of speech processing. In Experiment 1, the familiar and unfamiliar adjectives…

A study examined how preschool children use information about linguistic contrast in learning new words. The 72 subjects were assigned to four groups to play a game. They were asked to get an unfamiliar item, one of nine swatches of different colors, shapes, and materials. In the first group, the children were told only one label (color, shape, or…

The relationship between socioeconomic status and both recognition and recall vocabularies of upper elementary school children was studied. (CK)

Presents a study of the early vocabulary of young children, considering variables such as contextual flexibility, content, and composition of the lexicon in comprehension and production. Reports evidence for a relative independence between these two domains, and for an early version of the referential style observed at later stages of development.…

Examines issues relating to similarity neighborhoods of words in children's lexicons. Young children's receptive vocabularies were analyzed for three-phoneme, four-phoneme and five-phoneme words. The pattern of the original results from Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) was replicated. (18 references) (Author/CK)

In order to examine the extent to which adult judgments of first words depend on visual and auditory cues, spontaneous utterances were collected for boys and girls ages one year, five months to one year, ten months. Adults named the same toys. The older the speaker, the less perception was affected by visual context. (Author/SW)

Investigates expression of part-whole semantic relation by children 3 to 12 years old and indicates that older children prefer its use significantly more often. The part-whole semantic relation was also observed to take several linguistic forms, such as partitive, spatial, and possessive. Age, experimental task format, or type of experimental…

Fourteen two-year-olds were presented with minimal word pairs in a new and efficient experimental perception paradigm. Data provide a view of relative difficulty of various minimal phonological contrasts for children. (CHK)