Early changes in lexical processes: Evidence from children's naming errors

This research examines changes in lexical access and naming during a brief period of accelerated vocabulary growth. During this developmental transition, children showed a dramatic increase in naming errors of known words: children would point to a picture of an object that they had named correctly several times before but call it by some unrelated name.;Findings from Experiment 1 revealed a sharp rise and fall in naming errors that was coincident with changes in vocabulary growth. These errors were often perseverative in nature and appeared to reflect interference from a previously retrieved or semantically similar word. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that the curvilinear pattern of errors was related to changes in the activation strengths of individual words as children repeatedly used those words in production. The results showed that the errors were more frequent among experimental low practice words than among the specially trained high practice words.;Together, the findings suggest a general fragility of word retrieval processes at a time when children are acquiring many new words and are beginning to produce those words with greater frequency. Results are interpreted within a dynamic systems framework that integrates large scale developmental changes with the cascading and nonlinear effects of real-time behavior.;Children's naming errors were studied in the context of reading picture books with their parents. Two experiments documented the robustness of the phenomenon and examined the forces leading to the temporary disruption of lexical stability and the increase in the child's susceptibility to error. Experiment 1 was a cross-sectional design comparing children's naming errors as a function of vocabulary growth. Sixty children, ranging in age from 14 to 24 months, were assigned to one of three vocabulary ranges. Measures of vocabulary size were based on a parent checklist of the words their child spoke. Experiment 2 was a longitudinal study of 14 children, observed at three-week intervals, from 15 to 22 months of age. Parent diaries were used to measure increases in vocabulary rate.