Dissertations and Theses @ UNI
Availability
Open Access Thesis
Keywords
Communicative disorders in children;
Abstract
Lexical training is often the focus of young developmentally delayed children's early intervention programs, yet little is known about the most efficient way to train new vocabulary items with this population. Current literature links categorization skills to the rapid increase in normal developing children's vocabulary. The present study attempts to address the issue of whether or not taxonomic or thematic categorization training is an effective means of enhancing lexical learning. Subjects were 12 developmentally delayed children ages 2:8 to 5:11. They participated in four or five separate sessions: (a) pretesting session(s), (b) thematic categorization training, (c) taxonomic categorization training, and (d) a control condition in which no categorization training was provided. All subjects demonstrated at least a six-month delay in both expressive and receptive language, and scored at least one standard deviation below the mean on cognitive skills. They all demonstrated a mean length of utterance below two. All stimulus items used in the training were novel to each subject and were labeled based on individual subject's phonological repertoires. In the thematic training condition, subjects were trained to categorize four exemplars of the target item plus three distracter items thematically (whole/part). The taxonomic training session was similar to the thematic training, with the exception that subjects were trained to group taxonomically. Throughout the training sessions, 18-20 target item labels were produced by the investigator. In the control condition, subjects did not receive categorization training but were presented with target objects and allowed to freely manipulate each object as the investigator labeled each object 18-20 times. Testing of the subjects' comprehension and production of target and generalization items followed each training session. The results of this study indicated that there was no significant difference among the three experimental conditions in the number of target and generalization lexical items that were comprehended or produced. However, descriptive analyses of the data did reveal that, overall, subjects' comprehension and production of lexical items was slightly better in the control condition. The thematic training condition was found to be less effective overall than the other two conditions in facilitating lexical learning. The results of this investigation suggest that young developmentally delayed children's comprehension and production of new lexical items is not facilitated by categorization training. The findings from this study, however, do support the importance of object labeling when teaching new vocabulary to young children.
Year of Submission
1995
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Department of Communicative Disorders
First Advisor
Theresa A. Kouri
Second Advisor
Judith F. Harrington
Third Advisor
Jack B. Yates
Date Original
1995
Object Description
1 PDF file (55 leaves)
Copyright
©1995 Deanna L. Coffin
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Coffin, Deanna L., "Lexical Learning as a Function of Categorization Training in Young Developmentally Delayed Children" (1995). Dissertations and Theses @ UNI. 2374.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/2374
Comments
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