Symmetries and asymmetries in early lexical comprehension and production

Abstract

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.