Fast Mapping in Normal and Language-Impaired Children

In this study, the fast mapping skills of a group of 11 normal children (ages 4:0-5:6) were compared to those of a group of 11 language-impaired children (ages 4:1-5:4) exhibiting expressive syntactic deficits. Fast mapping is a hypothesized process enabling children to create lexical representations for new words after as little as a single exposure. Subjects encountered a nonsense word and its novel object referent. Subsequent tasks probed the amount and kinds of information about the new word that the subjects had entered into memory. Normal and language-impaired subjects did not differ in their ability to infer a connection between the novel word and referent, to comprehend the novel word after a single exposure, and to recall some nonlinguistic information associated with the referent. However, the language-impaired subjects were less successful than the normal subjects in producing the new word, recalling significantly fewer of its three phonemes.