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Learning Disabilities

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Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking IPL: Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

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Developmental differences in preschoolers' definition assessment and production.

Nicholas Tippenhauer¹, Yuyue Sun², Sofia R Jimenez¹

¹Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203, USA.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

|July 19, 2020

Summary

Preschoolers

Keywords:

Definitions Language comprehension Language development Language production Preschoolers Vocabulary development

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Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Linguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Children's ability to evaluate information is well-studied for explanations and arguments.
However, their capacity to assess and generate definitions remains under-explored.
Definitions are a crucial form of verbal information children encounter.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how preschoolers comprehend and produce definitions.
To examine age-related differences in definition assessment and generation.
To identify developmental shifts in understanding definitional quality.

Main Methods:

Experiment 1: Selective trust paradigm with 3- and 5-year-olds assessing circular vs. noncircular definitions from different informants.
Experiment 2: Eliciting definitions from 3- and 5-year-olds, coding for correctness and circularity.
Utilized age groups of 3-year-olds (n=53) and 5-year-olds (n=52) across both experiments.

Main Results:

Five-year-olds preferred noncircular definitions and selectively learned from informants providing information on infrequent words.
Three-year-olds did not systematically differentiate between definition types.
Five-year-olds produced more definitions overall and more noncircular definitions for infrequent words compared to 3-year-olds.

Conclusions:

Children's understanding and production of definitions develop significantly during the preschool years.
This study provides foundational insights into an understudied aspect of early lexical development.
Age-related improvements in evaluating and generating definitions emerge between 3 and 5 years of age.