Children's Difficulty with Word-Referent Differentiation

MARKMAN, ELLEN M. Children's Difficulty with Word-Referent Differentiation. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 742-749. An analysis of the cognitive demands of nominal realism tasks yielded 3 related hypotheses concerning children's poor performance: (a) children fail to clearly differentiate linguistic from empirical properties, with (b) the empirical properties being more salient due in part to (c) the intangibility of words. It was found in Study I that kindergarten and first-grade children perform better on analogous tasks involving pictorial representation where the symbol is as tangible as its referent, thus supporting (c). In Study II, hypothesis a was tested by differentiating linguistic and nonlinguistic properties for the firstand second-grade subjects and hypothesis b was tested by determining whether children were as likely to attribute properties of words to their referents. The data from the first graders were fully consistent, but the data from the second graders were only partially consistent with the hypotheses. The unexpected findings could be explained by postulating 2 advances in metalinguistic development in second graders. Though speculative, this explanation was shown to be in accord with previous research and with supplementary data analyses.