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Biomedical subjects

J Chasin

Publications and source records attributed to J Chasin.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Developments in early lexical comprehension: a comparison of parental report and controlled testing.

Six children were studied from the age of 0;6 to 1;6 in order to chart their developing comprehension vocabularies from the first to the 100th word. Observational data were used in the first instance to identify newly comprehended words and then controlled testing was carried out for each word to confirm and expand the observational data. Comprehension of words was divided into four categories--object names, context-bound object words, action words and personal names. The relative frequency of the different categories of word was found to change with the size of the comprehension vocabulary as personal names decreased in importance and both object names and action words became increasingly more common. There was considerable variation among the six children especially in the proportion of object names and action words that they understood but vocabulary composition became highly stable between 60 and 100 words.

Age Factors↗

Symmetries and asymmetries in early lexical comprehension and production.

Six children were visited in their homes every two weeks for 18 months from the age of six months in order to observe their developing comprehension and production of words. Controlled testing of the children's developing vocabulary was also carried out to provide a more detailed picture of the precise context in which a word was understood or produced. The results showed both similarities and individual differences among the children in patterns of early comprehension. For all six children there was a very close relationship between early production and comprehension of words: words that were contextually flexible in production tended also to be so in comprehension and words that were context-bound also tended to be so in both modalities although there was some evidence that the two types of word differed in the extent to which comprehension preceded production. All children were also similar in showing evidence of contextually flexible comprehension very early on. However, there were individual differences both in the rate at which comprehension developed and in the lag between comprehension and production. The significance of this pattern of development for accounts of lexical development is explored.

Child Language↗

Early lexical development and maternal speech: a comparison of children's initial and subsequent uses of words.

In Harris, Barrett, Jones & Brookes (1988), we reported the results of a detailed analysis of the initial uses of the first 10 words which were produced by four children. The present paper reports the results of an analysis of the subsequent uses of these 40 words. This analysis reveals that seven qualitatively different patterns of change occurred between the children's initial and subsequent uses of these words; the particular patterns of change which occurred support Barrett's (1986) model of early lexical development. In addition, it was found that, although there was a strong relationship between maternal speech and the children's initial word uses, the relationship between maternal speech and the children's subsequent word uses was very much weaker. These findings indicate that the role of linguistic input in early lexical development may decline quite sharply once the child has established initial uses for words.

Child Language↗

The deaf child.

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Child↗