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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 5, 2026

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

Published on: July 13, 2019

The representation of morphologically complex words in the developing lexicon.

Jennifer Rabin¹, Hélène Deacon

¹Department of Psychology, Life Sciences Centre, Dalhousie University, 1355 Oxford Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. jsrabin@yorku.ca

Journal of Child Language

|April 18, 2008

Summary

Children represent complex words similarly, whether inflected or derived. This finding remained consistent across grades 1 to 5, indicating stable lexical representation in developing minds.

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Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

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Published on: July 13, 2019

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment

Published on: June 25, 2019

Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Developmental Psychology
Cognitive Science

Background:

Understanding how children process and store morphologically complex words is crucial for theories of language acquisition.
Previous research has explored lexical representation, but the developmental trajectory for different morphological classes requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how children in elementary school (grades 1-5) represent morphologically complex words in their lexicon.
To compare the priming effects of inflected and derived words versus phonologically and orthographically similar control words.

Main Methods:

A fragment completion task was administered to children in grades 1 to 5.
Priming effects were assessed using morphologically related words (inflected and derived) and control words.

Main Results:

Both inflected (e.g., 'needs') and derived (e.g., 'needy') words served as more effective primes than control words (e.g., 'needle') for the target word 'need'.
These priming effects were consistent across the studied developmental period (grades 1-5).
The magnitude of priming from inflected and derived forms was equivalent.

Conclusions:

Children represent inflected and derived words similarly in their developing lexicon.
The findings suggest a stable developmental pattern in the representation of morphological word structures.
This study contributes to understanding the nature of lexical representation in child language acquisition.