This study aimed to establish normative data for 145 words using phonological and semantic association tasks with 242 French schoolchildren, ranging from ages 5 (Grande Section) to 8 (Cours Elémentaire 2), providing a fundamental resource for future research and educational planning. The participants were engaged in two primary tasks: a free…

Does child-directed language differ from adult-directed language in ways that might facilitate word learning? Associative structure (the probability that a word appears with its free associates), contextual diversity, word repetitions and frequency were compared longitudinally across six language corpora, with four corpora of language directed at…

We analyzed the differential processing of nouns and verbs in a lexical decision task. Moderate and high-frequency nouns and verbs were compared. The characteristics of our material were specified at the formal level (number of letters and syllables, number of homographs, orthographic neighbors, frequency and age of acquisition), and at the…

Results of a word association task administered to second and sixth grade children and adults suggest that whether the word association response is of the same or different form as the stimulus word is related to the word-count frequency of the stimulus and the participants age. (Author/KM)

In a response to Halliday (1993), Gee (1994) discussed the analogies between learning a language and learning in general. The article presents two of his proposals and discusses an empirical method for studying them. The article focuses on identifying the units acquired during language learning and the relevance of the concept of an innate…