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Updated: Jul 19, 2026
06:35
Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
Priming overgeneralizations in two- and four-year-old children.
Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe1, Brenda Connell, Linda Smith
1Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. gershkof@indiana.edu
Journal of Child Language
|October 5, 2006
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Overgeneralization, a common error in early word learning, involves children misusing words for objects.
- This phenomenon is frequently observed during the initial phases of language acquisition.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a laboratory method for eliciting word overgeneralizations in children.
- To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying children's overgeneralization errors in word retrieval.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Elicited overgeneralizations in 18 two-year-olds by priming object names.
- Experiment 2: Compared overgeneralization in 30 two-year-olds and 39 four-year-olds with novel objects.
- Utilized perceptual similarity to known objects to prime target object names.
Main Results:
- Children's word retrieval appears to be a blend of prior activation and similarity-based activation.
- Findings suggest a common activation-retrieval mechanism across different age groups.
Conclusions:
- A theoretical account of overgeneralization is proposed, based on adult language processing models.
- This mechanism may explain various naming errors, not just overgeneralizations, in child language.
- Suggests that errors may reflect retrieval processes rather than solely category representation gaps.
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