The Effects of Stimulus Variation on Lexical Learning

¹ University of Washington
² University of Montana
³ University of Texas at Austin
⁴ National Institutes of Health, NINCDS

At some early stage in a child's development of the comprehension and production of language, he/she must recognize that single words correspond to referents in the environment. How to best present the critical aspects of the environment to which a verbal label is attached is not entirely known. For language-impaired children it is important to know how to highlight this relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic cues so that therapy will be most effective. To examine how language-impaired children best learn single word lexical items, nouns and verbs were taught expressively through two modes of stimulus presentation thought to highlight the nonlinguistic environment: object manipulation and picture identification. The efficacy of these two treatment conditions was assessed with four children functioning at Piaget's sensorimotor period of development by using a single subject, alternating treatments design. The results indicated individual variation in learning strategies. Two of the children learned more single words (nouns and verbs) in the object manipulation condition. One child learned equally well in both conditions and the fourth child learned best in the picture identification condition. Variables accounting for the individual variation are discussed.

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