Early action word acquisition in normal and language-impaired children

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Abstract
The acquisition of words referring to three types of actions was examined in normally developing and language-impaired children using a nonsense word paradigm. Fourteen language-normal and 10 language-impaired children whose speech was limited to single-word utterances served as subjects. The children were presented with 12 experimental words in 5 sessions over a period of approximately 3 weeks. The experimental words referred to actions that were classified as intransitive, transitive and specific to a particular object, or transitive but performed on 4 different objects. The children in both groups produced few of the action words. However, the groups differed in their comprehension of the three action word types. Specifically, the language-impaired children did not exhibit differences in comprehension across the different types of actions. The language-normal children, however, comprehended fewer words for intransitive actions than for the other types. The implications of these findings for characterizations of early lexical acquisition and for the nature of specific language impairment are addressed.