Logical Relations in the Semantic Processing of Children between Six and Ten: Emergence of Antonym and Synonym Categorization

Abstract

HEIDENHEIMER, PATRICIA. Logical Relations in the Semantic Processing of Children between Six and Ten: Emergence of Antonym and Synonym Categorization. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 1243-1246. Previous theorizing and research suggest that the synonym relation develops earlier than the antonym relation in the child's semantic organization. This research fails to consider the possibility of different levels of processing for different classes of word stimulus and lacks controls for form class in its test word selection. In the present study, developmental sequence in the emergence of antonyms and synonyms was investigated by means of word association and false recognition tasks. The same set of nonobject words were used as the stimuli in each task. The subjects were 12 girls and 12 boys from grades 1, 3, and 5. Converging results were obtained for both tasks. First-grade subjects produced significantly more antonyms than synonyms and there was a significant increase in synonym production with age. In the word association task, the decline in context (that is, concrete exemplar and spatiotemporal) responses after first grade was highly significant and supported the hypothesis of a major shift to a higher-order level of lexical and logical organization.