Ling 425/709

Lexical Development

The Period of Single Word Utterances

1. Describe the general results on the early production of words in Buhler (1931) and Smith

      (1926).

2. What are Benedict’s two general findings on the acquisition of words in comprehension?

3. What is the evidence in Benedict that rate of acquisition and the gap between comprehension and production are independent of each other?

4. How do Expressive and Referential children, based on Nelson (1973), differ in the semantic categories of their vocabulary?

5. Cite Benedict’s findings on the differences in semantic categories for comprehension and production. What is the explanation given in class for this difference?

6. What is Gentner’s Natural Partitions Hypothesis?

7. What other explanations did Gentner test for the preponderance of nouns?

8. Describe the problem that type versus token frequency creates for Gentner’s hypothesis.

9. Define “underextension” and describe its relevance to understanding early vocabulary development.

10. Define “overextension” and give Braunwald’s example of her daughter’s use of “cookie”.

11. Give Rescorla’s findings on the frequency of overextensions.

12. Define Rescorla’s three kinds of overextensions, and give their frequency of occurrence.

13. What is an “associative complex”? Provide an example.

14. Describe the method used by Thomson and Chapman (1977) to study overextensions in comprehension and production. What were their results?

15. Describe how each of the following factors may underlie overextension:

a. semantic development

b. limited vocabulary

c. retrieval problems

d. phonological factors