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Updated: Jun 20, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
More is more: the relationship between vocabulary size and word extension
Emily E Thom1, Catherine M Sandhofer
1Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. emilyt0623@ucla.edu
Abstract:
This study experimentally tested the relationship between children's lexicon size and their ability to learn new words within the domain of color. We manipulated the size of 25 20-month-olds' color lexicons by training them with two, four, or six different color words over the course of eight training sessions. We subsequently tested children's ability to extend new color words to new instances. We found that training with a broader number of color words led to increased extension of new words. The results suggest that children's learning history predicts their ability to learn new words within domains.
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