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Related Experiment Videos

Semantic representation and naming in young children.

Karla K McGregor1, Rena M Friedman, Renée M Reilly

  • 1Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. k-mcgregor@northwestern.edu

Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR
|May 11, 2002
PubMed
Summary

Children

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Area of Science:

  • Child language acquisition
  • Cognitive psychology
  • Developmental linguistics

Background:

  • Understanding how children develop semantic representations is crucial for explaining language acquisition.
  • Semantic naming errors provide insights into the structure and accessibility of a child's lexicon.
  • The relationship between object knowledge and word retrieval in early development is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the nature of children's semantic representations and the causes of semantic naming errors.
  • To explore how functional and physical properties contribute to object knowledge in young children.
  • To evaluate a novel method, comparative picture naming/picture drawing, for assessing semantic representations.

Main Methods:

  • Experiment 1: 25 children (mean age 5y 4m) named, drew, and defined objects.
  • Experiment 2: 16 children (mean age 5y 5m) replicated key findings with controlled visual complexity.
  • A new procedure, comparative picture naming/picture drawing, was introduced and utilized.

Main Results:

  • Functional and physical properties are key to object representations, often organized taxonomically.
  • Limited semantic knowledge, including lexical gaps or fragile representations, underlies most semantic naming errors.
  • The degree of semantic knowledge influences word retrieval vulnerability.

Conclusions:

  • Semantic representations are dynamic and closely linked to naming abilities during development.
  • Comparative picture naming/picture drawing is a valuable tool for studying children's semantic knowledge.
  • Semantic naming errors in children often stem from incomplete or unstable semantic representations.

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