The Course of Children's Naming Errors in Early Word Learning

Abstract

Young children sometimes use 1 word in the place of another when attempting to name an object. Previous research has suggested several reasons why children may call an object by another name, including faulty hypothesis testing concerning the meaning of words, limitations in vocabulary size, and difficulties in retrieving the desired word from lexical memory. This study examined children's object naming in a longitudinal design. Ten children were tested at regular intervals from 16 to 24 months of age. Two tasks were presented: a picture book task used to elicit naming errors of known objects and a novel object task used to elicit word extensions to unknown referents. The results indicate that children are particularly prone to substitute 1 word for another during a narrow band of time, when they have between 50 and 150 words in their productive vocabularies. Moreover, the specific nature of the word substitutions suggests that they derive from common processes involving the activation and retrieval of words from a rapidly forming but still fragile lexicon.