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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Dec 1, 2025

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

How do children with developmental language disorder extend novel nouns?

Magali Krzemien¹, J-P Thibaut², Boutheina Jemel³

¹Department of Speech and Language Therapy, Research Unit on Childhood, University of Liège, 4000 Liège, Belgium; FRESH Fund, Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.)-Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), Belgium.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

|November 9, 2020

Summary

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) struggle with novel word learning, particularly for nonsolid items and spatial relations. They require more examples and focus on shape when learning new object names.

Keywords:

Comparison Developmental language disorder Generalization Language acquisition Shape Vocabulary

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Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Dec 1, 2025

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

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Published on: February 8, 2019

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism

Published on: October 3, 2018

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Linguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often exhibit difficulties in various language domains.
Word extension, a crucial aspect of vocabulary acquisition, involves generalizing novel words to new objects based on shared properties.
Understanding these generalization abilities in DLD is vital for targeted interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the word extension abilities of school-aged children with DLD across diverse object categories.
To compare the performance of children with DLD to typically developing (TD) peers.
To identify specific object properties and categories that pose challenges for children with DLD.

Main Methods:

A word extension task was administered to 15 school-aged children with DLD and age- or vocabulary-matched TD children.
Novel nouns were used to refer to objects from categories including solid, animate, nonsolid, functional, and spatial relations.
Children's ability to attend to diverse properties (shape, texture, role, spatial relation) for category membership was assessed.

Main Results:

Children with DLD showed significant impairments in extending novel words for nonsolid substances and relational objects.
Age-matched TD children performed well across all object classes, while language-matched TD children also struggled with spatial relation categories.
Children with DLD required more learning exemplars and relied more heavily on shape information, especially for spatial configuration objects.

Conclusions:

Children can learn regularities between object properties and category organization for novel noun generalization.
Deficits in novel name generalization and word learning are clearly linked to developmental language disorder (DLD).
Findings highlight the importance of diverse feature attention in word learning and suggest specific areas of difficulty for children with DLD.