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An examination of similarity neighbourhoods in young children's receptive vocabularies*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Jan Charles-Luce  and
Paul A. Luce
Jan Charles-Luce*
Affiliation:
University at Buffalo and Center for Cognitive Science
Paul A. Luce*
Affiliation:
University at Buffalo and Center for Cognitive Science
*
Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, 14260, USA.
Department of Psychology, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, 14260, USA.
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Abstract

Based on an analysis of similarity neighbourhoods of words in children's lexicons, Dollaghan (1994) argues that because of the degree of phonological overlap among lexical items in memory, children must perform detailed acoustic-phonetic analyses in order to recognize spoken words. This is in contradiction to Charles-Luce & Luce (1990), who reported that the similarity neighbourhoods in younger children's expressive lexicons are sparse relative to older children's and adult lexicons and that young children may be able to use more global word recognition strategies. The current investigation re-examined these issues. Similarity neighbourhoods of young children's RECEPTIVE vocabularies were analysed for three-phoneme, four-phoneme and five-phoneme words. The pattern of the original results from Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) was replicated.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , October 1995 , pp. 727 - 735
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by NIH Research grants 00–00957–03 and DC-00879–01. We would like to thank Peter Jusczyk for helpful discussions on this manuscript.

References

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