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Related Experiment Videos

Large constituent families help children parse compounds.

Andrea Krott1, Elena Nicoladis

  • 1School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK. a.krott@bham.ac.uk

Journal of Child Language
|March 23, 2005
PubMed
Summary

Children

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Child Language Acquisition
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Compound word processing is influenced by constituent family size in adults.
  • Limited research exists on how family size affects children's compound word segmentation.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the impact of constituent family size on children's ability to segment compound words.
  • To determine if factors like word frequency and prior knowledge influence this process.

Main Methods:

  • Twenty-five English-speaking children (ages 3;7 to 5;9) participated.
  • Children explained the meaning of compounds with varying constituent family sizes to a puppet.
  • Data collected on children's mention of compound modifiers.

Main Results:

  • Children were more likely to segment modifiers from compounds with large constituent families.
  • Word frequency, compound familiarity, and age had smaller, but significant effects.
  • Results indicate a reliance on lexical statistics and analogical reasoning.

Conclusions:

  • Children's segmentation of compound words is influenced by the "family size" of their constituents.
  • Analogical processes, drawing from existing vocabulary, likely facilitate compound segmentation in children.

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