A dual criterion account of the development of linguistic judgment in early childhood

Available online at www.sciencedirect.comJournal of

Journal of Memory and Language 58 (2008) 1012–1031

Memory andLanguage

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A dual criterion account of the developmentof linguistic judgment in early childhood q

William E. Merriman *, Amanda R. Lipko

Department of Psychology, Kent State University, Kent OH 44240, USA

Received 7 February 2007; revision received 3 September 2007Available online 20 February 2008

Abstract

Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target generation, to makeseveral linguistic judgments. When deciding whether a word is one they know, for example, some were expected to con-sider whether they recognized its sound form (cue recognition), whereas others were expected to consider whether ameaning came to mind (target generation). The particular criterion that a child adopted was predicted to depend onthe efficiency of the phonological or semantic memory processes that supported its use. Fifty-two preschoolers madethree linguistic judgments (word familiarity, syntactic acceptability, and object nameability) and received four memorytests. Five correlations between specific memory measures and specific judgments were predicted by the dual criterionaccount. Five hypotheses about the distinctiveness of these correlations were also tested. The results supported the fivepredictions as well as three of the distinctiveness hypotheses. The potential of the account for generating new hypoth-eses about memory and metalinguistic awareness in early childhood was also demonstrated.� 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Language development; Memory development; Metalinguistic awareness; Phonological working memory; Word familiarityjudgment; Object nameability judgment; Syntactic acceptability judgment; Word meaning retrieval

The ability to judge whether linguistic expressionssound right or make sense is not only uniquely human,but may also promote language acquisition itself. Uponencountering a new word, the child who realizes that it isunfamiliar may behave differently than other childrendo. The youngster may be less apt to try to retrieve

0749-596X/$ - see front matter � 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserv

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.10.003

q We thank the families and staff of local preschools for theirhelp. The constructive comments of John Dunlosky andKatherine Rawson regarding drafts of the manuscript werevery valuable. Prov 3:5.

* Corresponding author. Fax: +1 101 330 672 3786.E-mail address: [email protected] (W.E. Merriman).

the word’s meaning or to move on to processing the nextword in input, and more inclined to ask a clarifyingquestion or use reasoning to determine the word’s mean-ing (Marazita & Merriman, 2004). Likewise, the childwho realizes that an initial interpretation of a sentencedoes not make sense may be less likely to terminate pro-cessing and more likely to seek clarification or try analternative parsing (Marshall & Morton, 1978).

The causal relationship may also work in the oppo-site direction, with the acquisition of new linguisticexpressions, or at least improvement in processing them,fostering the development of linguistic judgment (Bialy-stok, 2005; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Merriman, Lipko, &

ed.

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W.E. Merriman, A.R. Lipko / Journal of Memory and Language 58 (2008) 1012–1031 1013

Evey, 2006; Smith & Tager-Flusberg, 1982). In this arti-cle, we present a theory that specifies various causes thatoperate in this direction.

Correlations between processing and judgment havebeen documented in early child language. For example,3- and 4-year-olds’ comprehension of complex utter-ances has been found to be related to how accuratelythey judge the acceptability of utterances that wereeither well formed (e.g., Wash your hands) or not (e.g.,Hands your wash) (Chaney, 1992; de Villiers & de Vil-liers, 1974; Smith & Tager-Flusberg, 1982). Also, thosepreschoolers with the strongest tendency to map novelwords onto unfamiliar rather than familiar entities haveproved to be better judges of whether various words areones that they know or of whether various objects areones that they can name (Marazita & Merriman, 2004;Merriman & Marazita, 2004). Those who most consis-tently selected a garlic press rather than a cup whenasked which one was a pilson, for example, also tendedto say, ‘‘No,’’ more frequently when first asked whetherthey knew what a pilson was.

Our goal was to evaluate an account that links the effi-ciency of specific memory processes to the development ofspecific linguistic judgments in early childhood. Threejudgments were examined—word familiarity (whethervarious words are known or unknown); object nameabil-ity (whether various objects have known or unknownnames); and syntactic acceptability (whether various sen-tences have correct or incorrect word order). The two cen-tral claims of our dual criterion account are that a child firstlearns to use one of two criteria for each judgment, andthat the efficiency of specific memory processes influencesthe particular criterion that he or she first learns to use.

Previous accounts

Despite the potential importance of basic linguisticjudgments for language acquisition, few hypotheses havebeen advanced regarding how they are made or whatcauses them to develop. Hakes (1980) asked 4- to 8-year-olds to judge the number of phonemes contained in words,whether various utterances were syntactically acceptable,and whether pairs of utterances conveyed the same mean-ing. The accuracy of each judgment was found to be asso-ciated with how well the Piagetian concept of conservationwas understood. Hakes proposed that the development oflinguistic decentration, or the ability to mentally standback from one’s use or comprehension of an expression,caused across-the-board improvement in linguistic judg-ment from early to middle childhood.

Smith and Tager-Flusberg (1982) objected to thisaccount, and found 3- and 4-year-olds’ judgments to bemore accurate than Hakes (1980) and others had pro-posed. They also noted that relations among the judg-ments and between the judgments and other cognitive

measures were not easily interpreted. For example, lexi-cal judgments were not more strongly related to eachother than to grammatical judgments, and were not morestrongly related to vocabulary size than the grammaticaljudgments were. Likewise, the grammatical judgmentswere neither more strongly related to each other thanto the lexical judgments, nor more strongly related tosyntax comprehension than the lexical judgments were.Chaney (1992) replicated these findings with 3-year-olds.

Smith and Tager-Flusberg (1982) speculated thatchildren might extract insights about word meaningnot only from their mental lexicon, but also from knowl-edge embodied in their parser. Likewise, youngstersmight draw insights about grammatical relations fromboth of these sources. No suggestions were made regard-ing how such insights could be extracted, however.

Karmiloff-Smith (1992) did not address children’sinterpretability judgments per se, but did propose amechanism that implies the existence of process-judg-ment relations that are more specific than those positedby Hakes (1980) or Smith and Tager-Flusberg (1982).According to Karmiloff-Smith, children begin to makereflective judgments about forms only after the processesunderlying use and comprehension of the forms havebeen overlearned. For example, past tense markingneeds to become fairly automatic allegedly before a childwill begin to compare and contrast such markings withother forms. This proposal implies that when childrenare first learning to make a linguistic judgment, theiraccuracy should be related to how efficiently they exe-cute the specific processes that produce the representa-tions upon which the judgment reflects.

The dual criterion account of word familiarity judgment

In contrast to previous accounts, Merriman et al.(2006) argued that individual differences in the ways thatearly linguistic judgments are made mask specific rela-tions between these judgments and memory processes.Proposals were advanced regarding the ways that chil-dren judge whether various words are ones that theyknow (word familiarity). Some youngsters were hypoth-esized to make this decision based on whether they rec-ognized a word’s sound form (cue recognition), whereasothers were hypothesized to primarily consider whetherthey retrieved the word’s meaning (target retrieval). Forexample, some would judge hoost to be unknownbecause they did not recognize its sound-form, whereasothers would judge it to be unknown because theyretrieved no meaning for it.

Merriman et al. (2006) proposed that those childrenwho possessed above-average phonological workingmemory (WM), but who tended to activate and retrieveless semantic information when encoding a word woulduse the word form recognition criterion, whereas those

1014 W.E. Merriman, A.R. Lipko / Journal of Memory and Language 58 (2008) 1012–1031

with the opposite memory profile would base judgmentson word meaning retrieval. The results of two experi-ments were consistent with this account. Among those3- and 4-year-olds who showed low levels of semanticinterference in recall, accuracy of word familiarity judg-ment was directly related to a measure of phonologicalWM. Among those showing high levels of semanticinterference, judgment accuracy was unrelated to pho-nological WM. Conversely, among those showing poorphonological WM, judgment accuracy was directlyrelated to the magnitude of semantic interference.Among those showing above-average phonologicalWM, judgment accuracy was unrelated to semanticinterference. These findings support the claim that ifonly one of the two relevant memory processes is suffi-ciently developed, then children learn to judge wordfamiliarity fairly accurately, and make these judgmentsbased on the more advanced memory process.

The dual criterion account not only posits individualdifferences in the criteria used for linguistic judgment,but also identifies individual differences in memory pro-cesses and describes ways of measuring them. Some chil-dren should excel at establishing and maintaining wordsound-forms in working memory, which can be mea-sured by the ability to repeat back high-wordlikepseudowords (Baddeley, 2003; Gathercole, 1995). Oth-ers should experience the activation and retrieval ofgreater amounts of semantic information than theirpeers in response to hearing a familiar word, whichcan be measured by how much proactive interferencebuilds up over recall trials for object names from thesame category (e.g., chair, TV, then table, bed, thenlamp, rug) (Huttenlocher & Lui, 1979). Merriman et al.(2006) found no relation between these respective mea-sures of phonological WM and semantic retrieval,implying that individual differences in these memoryprocesses in early childhood are independent of eachother.

Table 1The pairs of criteria for each linguistic judgment

Judgment

Cue recognitio

Word familiarity Cue: Word formDo you know what How familiar doesa [e.g., zav] is? word form seem?

Object nameability Cue: ObjectDo you know the How familiar doesname for this [object]? object seem?

Syntactic acceptability Cue: Sentence formDid he say it the How familiar doesright or wrong way? sentence form seem

The expanded dual criterion account

Here we have expanded the dual criterion account sothat it not only addresses judgments of word familiarity,but also judgments of object nameability and syntacticacceptability. Five predicted memory-judgment links,or correlations, were derived from the expanded accountand evaluated in the current study. Five other hypothe-ses that were consistent with the account, but dependedon other assumptions as well, were also tested. The latterconcerned the distinctiveness of the link predictions. Thelink predictions and distinctiveness hypotheses werederived from four sources: pairs of criteria proposedfor each judgment (see Table 1); claims about the mem-ory processes that promote acquisition of each criterion(see Process in Table 2); claims about how each memoryprocess can be measured (see Measure in Table 2); andthe claim that a process must become rather well devel-oped before a child can begin to reflect on its products.

The account takes its lead from analyses of two pro-cesses that adults often execute when answering knowl-edge questions, namely, cue recognition and targetretrieval (Koriat & Levy-Sadot, 2001; Reder, 1987).When asked, ‘‘What is the capital of Ohio?,’’ for exam-ple, many develop a feeling that they know the answereven before they retrieve it. This feeling of knowing ishypothesized to be based primarily on recognition ofthe cues in the question (e.g., recognizing the wordsOhio, the capital of). If pressed to indicate whether ornot they know the answer to the question before theymanage to retrieve it, adults usually decide based onthe strength of their feeling of knowing. If they areallowed to take as much time as they want to retrievethe answer, the strength of this feeling influences howlong they search for the answer before giving up. Andif they do give up, the feeling may be strong enoughfor them to decide that they actually know the answer,but just cannot recall it at the moment.

Criterion

n Target generation

Target: Word meaningthe Does a meaning for the word

come to mind?

Target: Object namethe Does a name for the object

come to mind?

Target: Sentence meaningthe Does an interpretation for the? sentence come to mind?

Table 2Processes and measures associated with each judgment criterion

Judgment Criterion

Cue recognition Target generation

Word familiarity Cue: Word form Target: Word meaningProcess Phonological WM Semantic retrievalMeasure Repetition of high-wordlike Recall of categorically-

pseudowords related nouns

Object nameability Cue: Object Target: Object nameProcess Object recognition Object name retrievalMeasure Name-distinct Name-distinct

object recognitiona object recognitiona

Syntactic acceptability Cue: Sentence form Target: Sentence meaningProcess Phonological WM Semantic integrationMeasure Repetition of high-wordlike Recall of categorically-

pseudowords unrelated nouns

Notes. aPerformance on this measure is affected by both object recognition and object name retrieval.


Our proposal is that preschool-age children first learnto judge word familiarity, object nameability, and syn-tactic acceptability by using either a cue recognition ortarget generation criterion. They learn to base thesejudgments on whether they recognize the stimulus underconsideration or whether they generate key verifyinginformation. When judging whether a word is one theyknow, for example, they decide based on whether theyrecognize the word form (cue recognition) or whetherthey believe they have retrieved or constructed theword’s meaning (target generation) (see Table 1). Thosewho follow the first procedure accept the word only ifthey judge its sound form to be a familiar one and thosewho follow the second procedure accept the word only ifwhat they judge to be the word’s meaning comes tomind. Note that constructing a meaning rather thanretrieving one is an option for multi-morphemic words.Rather than retrieving the meaning of a word such asdoghouse directly, for example, a child may construct itfrom the (retrieved) meanings of its parts. We use theword ‘‘generation’’ to include both the option of retriev-ing or constructing a mental representation.

When judging object nameability, the primary cue isan object and the target to be generated is its name.According to our account, some children judge whetherthey know an object’s name based on whether they rec-ognize the object (cue recognition) and others decidebased on whether they retrieve or construct its name(target generation) (see Table 1). Note that cue recogni-tion need not involve identifying the individual object asone that has been encountered before; it may be suffi-cient to recognize it as an instance of a category thathas been seen before (i.e., as a familiar kind of object,e.g., a cup).

When judging syntactic acceptability, the primarycue is the form of the uttered sentence, and the target(at least for some children) is its interpretation. Accord-ing to our account, some judge whether an utterance isthe ‘‘right or wrong way around’’ based on whetherthe stream of word forms that they hear seems like afamiliar type of sentence (cue recognition) and othersdecide based on whether they can interpret the stream(target generation). Again, cue recognition need notinvolve identifying the particular utterance as one thathas been heard before; it may be sufficient to recognizeit as an instance of a familiar type. Cue recognition isassumed to be a primarily non-semantic process thatdepends on how well the word sequence matches repre-sentations of sequences that have been heard before.

Even infants can detect and retain order relations in astream of nonsense words (Gomez & Gerken, 1999;Marcus, Vijayan, Bandi Rao, & Vishton, 1999; Saffran& Wilson, 2003). The existence of this early capacitymakes it plausible to hypothesize that at a later age somechildren come to judge syntactic acceptability on thegrounds of form relations rather than meaning relations.They may reject a reverse-ordered imperative such as,‘‘Hands your wash,’’ for example, because they knowthat hands is not an instance of a type of word form thatwhen positioned first can be followed by the type ofword form instantiated by your. They may not be awarethat they are using this knowledge; the claim is only thattheir rejection of an utterance may be based upon it.

We are not proposing that every child learns to useonly one criterion for a judgment or that the memory pro-cesses that support acquisition of each criterion for a par-ticular judgment are completely independent. Rather, wepropose that every child first learns to use only one crite-


rion, and that the relevant memory processes are suffi-ciently independent, or differentially developed, to influ-ence criterion choice. The first proposal is consistentwith the general finding that children move from an initialfocus on only one aspect of a problem to an approach thattakes several aspects into account (Andrews & Halford,2002; Case, 1998; Siegler, 1996). Regarding the empiricalbasis for the assumption of sufficient memory indepen-dence, we know of no early child research other than thatreported by Merriman et al. (2006) that has examinedintercorrelations among the relevant memory processes.The current study filled this gap.

The link predictions and distinctiveness hypotheses

The link predictions and distinctiveness hypothesesare organized into five pairs in Table 3. The link predic-tion in each pair ties a specific judgment to a specificmemory process, usually just in those children who showlow levels of development in another memory process(one that would support acquiring the alternative crite-rion for the judgment). The distinctiveness hypothesisin each pair asserts that the predicted relation will bestronger than relations between the specific memory pro-cess and the other two linguistic judgments.

Word familiarity judgment and semantic retrieval

(Pair 1)

A different measure of semantic retrieval than the oneadministered by Merriman et al. (2006) was used. If it

Table 3The link predictions and distinctiveness hypotheses

Word familiarity judgment1. a. Link: Magnitude of semantic retrieval, as measured by the reca

judgment among children showing low levels of phonological WMb. Distinctiveness: The predicted relation in the ‘‘low phonologicalsemantic retrieval and other linguistic judgments in this group.

2. a. Link: Efficiency of phonological WM, as measured by repetitionjudgment among those showing low levels of semantic retrieval, bb. Distinctiveness: The predicted relation in the ‘‘low semantic retrphonological WM and other linguistic judgments in this group.

Syntactic acceptability judgment3. a. Link: Semantic integration tendencies, as measured by recall of

those showing low levels of phonological WM, but not among thob. Distinctiveness: The predicted relation in the ‘‘low phonologicalsemantic integration and other linguistic judgments in this group.

4. a. Link: Phonological WM will be related to syntactic acceptabilitintegration tendencies, but not among those showing stronger tenb. Distinctiveness: The predicted relation in the ‘‘weak semantic inphonological WM and other linguistic judgments in this group.

Object nameability judgment5. a. Link: Name-distinct object recognition will be related to object

b. Distinctiveness: The predicted relation will be stronger than relalinguistic judgments in all children.

were also found to relate to word familiarity judgmentin the predicted manner, then empirical support forthe dual criterion account would be bolstered. The cur-rent measure was recall of triplets of categorically-related nouns (e.g., pig, cow, horse, then sand, mud, dirt).Each triplet represented a different category, whichmeant that semantic retrieval would serve to counteract,or cause release from, any proactive interference thatmight develop over trials. Consistent with this analysis,(Huttenlocher & Lui (1979), Study 2) found that pre-school-age children’s free recall of categorically-relatedtriplets exceeded that for unrelated triplets. They attrib-uted this effect to the spread of semantic activationamong related nouns that occurred during encodingand retrieval.

Regarding the distinctiveness hypothesis, Merrimanet al. (2006) found that the correlation between wordfamiliarity judgment and semantic retrieval among the‘‘low phonological’’ participants remained significanteven after shared relations with vocabulary size werepartialled out. Moreover, the correlation became non-significant when the accuracy of word familiarity judg-ment was replaced in the computation by the accuracyof object nameability judgment, despite a moderatelystrong correlation between these judgment scores.

The dual criterion explanation for these results isthat children’s rate of learning to judge word familiarityon the basis of word meaning retrieval depends on howmuch semantic information they typically retrieve inresponse to familiar words. The greater the amountretrieved, the easier it is for the child to detect the

ll of categorically-related nouns, will be related to this, but not among those showing high levels.WM’’ group will be stronger than relations between

of high-wordlike pseudowords, will be related to thisut not among those showing high levels.ieval’’ group will be stronger than relations between

unrelated nouns, will be related to this judgment amongse showing high levels.WM’’ group will be stronger than relations between

y judgment among children showing weaker semanticdencies.tegration’’ group will be stronger than relations between

nameability judgment among all children.tions between name-distinct object recognition and other


relation between whether a word causes semantic infor-mation about itself to be retrieved and whether theword is to be identified as known, that is, the easier itis to learn to use the target generation criterion. Theaccuracy of word familiarity judgment should only beassociated with semantic retrieval among children forwhom the other basis for making accurate judgments,word form recognition, is not well developed. Amongthose who show advanced working memory for wordforms (as measured by pseudoword repetition), eventhose who retrieve little semantic information mayjudge word familiarity accurately because they haveacquired the cue recognition criterion for making thisjudgment.

Both the current measure of semantic retrieval andthe one used by Merriman et al. (2006) involved recallafter a brief period of interfering verbal activity (identi-fying finger counts). This activity was intended to reducethe dependence of children’s recall on phonologicalWM. Repetition of high-wordlike pseudowords (Gath-ercole, 1995), which served as our measure of the lattercapacity (see next section), has been found to be corre-lated with children’s word or digit span, that is, withhow well they recall a short list of words or numbersimmediately after hearing them.

Word familiarity judgment and phonological WM

(Pair 2)

Children’s efficiency in storing and maintaining novelwords forms in phonological WM was assessed by hav-ing them try to repeat back high-wordlike pseudowordssuch as rubid and stoppogratic. Merriman et al. (2006)found preschool-age children were better able to repeatthese than to repeat low-wordlike pseudowords such asglistow and perplisteronk. Gathercole and colleagues(Gathercole, 1995; Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, & Badde-ley, 1991), who developed this repetition task, obtainedsimilar findings with British child samples. They pro-posed that bottom-up encoding and storage processesin phonological STM as well as top-down retrieval fromknowledge of word forms (phonological LTM) deter-mine whether an accurate representation of a high-wordlike pseudoword is maintained in phonologicalWM well enough for the child to repeat it backcorrectly.

Like Pair 1, Pair 2 is consistent with the resultsreported by Merriman et al. (2006). Regarding the dis-tinctiveness hypothesis, the correlation between wordfamiliarity judgment and phonological WM amongthose who showed low levels of semantic retrievalremained significant even after shared relations withvocabulary size were partialled out, and became nonsig-nificant when the accuracy of word familiarity judgmentwas replaced in the computation of the correlation bythe accuracy of object nameability judgment.

The rationale for the claims of Pair 2 is that if wordmeaning retrieval processes are sufficiently well devel-oped, the quality of phonological WM should not affecthow rapidly children learn to judge word familiarity.Advanced semantic retrieval processes support learningto base this judgment on target generation rather thancue recognition. Therefore, pseudoword repetition per-formance should be unrelated to judgment accuracyamong those who show higher levels of semantic retrie-val. If such retrieval processes are poorly developed,however, children’s rate of learning to judge word famil-iarity on the basis of word form recognition shoulddepend on the quality of their WM for word forms.Therefore, pseudoword repetition should be related toword familiarity judgment among those who show lowerlevels of semantic retrieval.

Syntactic acceptability judgment and semantic integration

(Pair 3)

As in previous studies (Chaney, 1992; Smith & Tager-Flusberg, 1982), the ability to judge syntactic acceptabilitywas assessed by having participants decide whether a pup-pet had said something ‘‘the right way or the wrong wayaround.’’ They heard the puppet utter some comprehensi-ble three word commands (Wash your hands) and somereverse-ordered ones (Hands your wash). The hypothesizedtarget generation criterion was to base this judgment onwhether a meaning could be retrieved or constructed forthe utterance (see Table 1). Children who show above-average semantic integration tendencies were hypothesizedto be among the first to learn to use this criterion.

Thematic roles are semantic relations that areexpressed by noun, verb, and prepositional phrases insentences (Langacker, 1987; Tomasello, 2003). Forexample, in ‘‘The boy hit the ball,’’ the role of agent isexpressed by The boy, the role of action is expressedby hit, and the role of patient by the ball. Comprehend-ing a sentence involves determining how thematic rolesare instantiated, or fleshed out, by the meanings of thecontent words in the sentence. Once ‘‘the boy,’’ ‘‘hit,’’and ‘‘the ball’’ are identified as the phrases that expressan agent-action-patient relation, for example, the childmust decide how the specific meanings of boy, hit, andball are to be integrated so that this relation can beinstantiated. The child must generate a conception ofhow a boy and hitting can be combined so as to satisfyan agent-action relation, and of how hitting and a ballcan be combined so as to satisfy an action–patient rela-tion. If semantic integration fails, the child is left withonly a vague, disjoint sense of the message conveyedby the sentence.

Children’s immediate recall of triplets of unrelatednouns (e.g., tree, fan, juice) was hypothesized to be facil-itated to the extent that they attempted to integrate thenouns’ meanings at encoding. Their tendency to con-


ceive of the denoted objects as being in some kind ofrelation was assumed to promote their subsequent recallof the objects’ names. Thus, recall of such lists after abrief interfering activity was considered an index of thetendency to construct and later retrieve semantic inte-grations of the words in a sequence. Note that this taskalso included a brief interfering verbal activity betweenpresentation and recall so that the influence of phono-logical WM would be reduced.

The hypothesis that individual differences in youngchildren’s recall of unrelated nouns reflect individual dif-ferences in semantic integration tendencies is novel. Indi-rect support for these proposals can be found, however.Semantic congruency has been found to affect an event-related potential component, the anterior N400, in both3- and 4-year-olds (Sylva-Pereyra, Rivera-Gaxiola, &Kuhl, 2005). The amplitude of this component tends tobe greater when a word does not fit semantic context(e.g., ‘‘movie’’ in ‘‘My uncle will blow the movie’’) thanwhen it does (e.g., ‘‘movie’’ in ‘‘My uncle will watch themovie.’’) The N400 response in both children and adultshas been hypothesized to reflect processes that integratethe meaning of a stimulus with the meaning of its context(Friedrich & Friederici, 2005; Holcomb, 1993). Addition-ally, 1-year-olds have shown a greater N400-like compo-nent in response to unrelated word-picture pairscompared to related ones (Friedrich & Friederici, 2004,2005), and both 1- and 2-year-olds have shown a greaterN400-like component in response to an unrelated word-word pair compared to a related one (Torkildsen, Syver-sen, Simonsen, Moen, & Lindgren, 2007). These findingsmake it reasonable to hypothesize that the accuracy ofsemantic-based judgments of sentence acceptability cov-aries with how well children recall lists of unrelated nouns.

Those who show the strongest semantic integrationtendencies, as measured by unrelated recall, should bethe first to learn to judge syntactic acceptability basedon whether the message conveyed by an utterance canbe constructed or retrieved. Because those who possesssuperior phonological WM should tend to learn theother criterion for making such judgments (i.e., sentenceform recognition), unrelated noun recall should bedirectly related to the accuracy of syntactic acceptabilityjudgment only among those showing below-averagephonological WM. No relation should be evident amongthe other children. According to the distinctivenesshypothesis, the predicted link for the ‘‘low phonologicalWM’’ children should be stronger than associationsbetween semantic integration tendencies and other lin-guistic judgments in this group of children.

Syntactic acceptability judgment and phonological WM

(Pair 4)

The cue recognition procedure for this judgmentinvolves deciding whether the form of some multi-word

utterance sounds like a kind that one has heard before(see Table 1). According to the dual criterion account,children should tend to use this form-based procedureif they do not generate sentence interpretations verywell, but excel at encoding and retaining uninterpretedword forms and the sequential relations among them.

Although the pseudoword repetition test did notinvolve the presentation of a multi-word utterance, itdid require children to encode and retain sequential rela-tions among phonemes and among larger phonologicalunits within novel words. (The pseudowords ranged inlength from two to four syllables.) We judged that theability to encode and retain such information would besufficiently related to the ability to encode and retainthe sequential relations in a stream of unfamiliar wordsthat it would not be necessary to develop a separate testof the latter ability. Both should reflect how well phono-logical WM functions. In support of this assumption,four-year-olds’ pseudoword repetition has been foundto be highly correlated with their short term recognitionmemory for the order in which the pseudowords in ashort list have been presented (Gathercole, Service,Hitch, Adams, & Martin, 1999).

Among those exhibiting below-average semantic inte-gration tendencies, the ability to repeat back high-word-like pseudowords was predicted to relate directly to theaccuracy of syntactic acceptability judgment. Becausethe memory processes that would support acquisitionof the target generation criterion are poorly developedin these children, they could only learn the cue recogni-tion procedure, and would only learn it if their phono-logical WM were sufficiently developed. According tothe distinctiveness hypothesis, this predicted relationfor ‘‘weak semantic integrators’’ should be stronger thanthat found between phonological WM and other linguis-tic judgments in this group.

Regarding those showing strong semantic integrationtendencies, pseudoword repetition was predicted to beunrelated to the accuracy of syntactic acceptability judg-ment (part of the Pair 4 link prediction). This claim isjust another instance of the general proposal that ifthe processes that support acquisition of one criterionare sufficiently developed, then the quality of the pro-cesses that support acquisition of the other criterion willnot affect how quickly a child learns to make thejudgment.

Object nameability judgment and name-distinct object

recognition (Pair 5)

According to the dual criterion account, object name-ability judgment is based on either object recognition orobject name generation (see Table 1). Moreover, objectname retrieval ability should predict the accuracy ofsuch judgments only among those with under-developedobject recognition (i.e., in the group that is unlikely to


learn the object recognition criterion). Likewise, objectrecognition ability should predict judgment accuracyonly among those with below-average object nameretrieval skill (i.e., in the group that is unlikely to learnthe name generation criterion).

Ideally, separate tests of object recognition andobject name retrieval should be used. These were diffi-cult to develop, however. Standard tests of object recog-nition involve presenting familiar objects, then laterasking participants to pick these out from sets that alsoinclude other familiar objects (Kail, 1990). Presumably,youngsters with superior object recognition processeswould do well on such a test, but so too might ones withsuperior name retrieval skill. Even if unfamiliar objectswere used instead of familiar ones in the recognition par-adigm, superior name retrievers might be better able togenerate descriptions during encoding (e.g., like a clock

for a barometer), and might achieve high recognitionscores by deciding whether they have generated anobject description at test that they recognize as havinggenerated at encoding.

Because of this problem, we devised a less rigoroustest of the dual criterion account for object nameabilityjudgments. Children were given a memory test on whichthey would perform better than their peers if either theirobject recognition or object name retrieval processeswere well developed than if neither of these processeswas well developed. According to the Pair 5 link predic-tion, test performance should be directly related to theaccuracy of children’s object nameability judgments.According to the associated distinctiveness hypothesis,this relation should be stronger than that between testperformance and the accuracy of the other linguisticjudgments. Because the test was not ‘‘memory-process-pure,’’ however, results would not reveal how stronglyobject nameability judgments were related to object rec-ognition processes alone or to name retrieval processesalone.

This name-distinct object recognition test involvedpresenting pictures of familiar objects, each of whichhad a distinct basic level name. Later, the children hadto pick out these pictures from arrays that also con-tained pictures of other distinctively-named familiarobjects. They were expected to excel to the extent thatthey recognized the targets and/or recognized the namesthat that they had previously generated for them.

Assumptions underlying the distinctiveness hypotheses

Although both the link predictions and distinctive-ness hypotheses presume the validity of the dual crite-rion account, the distinctiveness hypotheses alsopresume the independence of memory processes. Thus,disconfirmation of any distinctiveness hypothesis couldbe the result of covariation among memory processesrather than reflect some flaw in the dual criterion

account itself. For example, were semantic retrievalfound to be substantially related to both word familiarityand object nameability judgment, the reason might bethat semantic retrieval covaries with the quality of oneof the memory processes hypothesized by the dual crite-rion account to promote the development of objectnameability judgment. This interpretation can beaddressed by examining correlations between memoryprocesses.

Empirical support for any of the distinctivenesshypotheses would pose a challenge for alternatives tothe dual criterion account. For example, if as hypothe-sized, semantic retrieval were found to be correlatedwith word familiarity judgment, but not other linguisticjudgments, this result would be inconsistent with alter-native explanations such as that smarter, more knowl-edgeable, or more reflective children just tend toretrieve greater amounts of semantic information aboutfamiliar words.

Methods

Participants

Fifty-two children (M age = 3–8; median = 3–8;range = 3–0 to 4–10; 31 boys and 21 girls) were recruitedfrom preschools or daycare centers in middle classneighborhoods in northeastern Ohio. No child wasdropped from the study. However, nineteen childrendid fail to recall a single word in the recall tasks.

Materials and procedure

All participants were asked to perform seven tasks,which were presented in one of two counterbalancedorders (Order A: word familiarity judgment, objectnameability judgment, syntactic acceptability judgment,name-distinct object recognition, pseudoword repeti-tion, related recall, and unrelated recall; Order B:

name-distinct object recognition, syntactic acceptabilityjudgment, object nameability judgment, word familiar-ity judgment, pseudoword repetition, related recall,and unrelated recall). Unrelated recall always followedrelated recall because it was the more difficult of thetwo tasks. In a pilot study, when this task was adminis-tered first, many children failed to recall any unrelatedwords and then refused to take the subsequent relatedrecall task.

The tasks were presented individually in a quiet roomin the child’s school or daycare center. A thirteen-inchPanasonic television and a Panasonic DVD player wereplaced on a table. The experimenter and child sat next toeach other at the table approximately two feet from thetelevision screen. The same experimenter (the secondauthor) tested every child in the study.


Word familiarity judgment

The stimuli and procedures developed by Merrimanet al. (2006), (Study 2) for eliciting these judgments wereused. A child was told, ‘‘You are going to hear somewords. Some are words that you will know, but othersare just made-up or pretend words. I want you to tellme which words you know. If I say a word that youknow, say ‘yes’. If you don’t know the word, say ‘no’.You can’t say anything else—just ‘yes’ or ‘no’.’’ Twopractice trials were presented (‘‘Do you know what a{book, zimbidy} is?’’) The child was told whether his orher answer was correct. Ten test questions were pre-sented in a random order, five familiar (dog, house, TV,

truck, table) and five unfamiliar (mosby, biffle, pug, nure,

gocken). The experimenter responded to the child’sanswers with an occasional ‘‘OK’’ or ‘‘Good.’’ Afterthe test, every question about an unfamiliar word towhich the child had answered, ‘‘Yes,’’ was repeated. Ifthe child responded affirmatively again, he/she wasasked, ‘‘What is it?’’ His or her explanation was analyzedto determine whether the word had been misidentified asa phonologically-similar familiar word (eg. nurse insteadof nure). No such misidentifications were evident.

Object nameability judgment

The procedure developed by Marazita and Merriman(2004) for eliciting these judgments was used, but thestimuli were objects rather than drawings of objects.Children were told that they were going to see someobjects that they knew and some that they did not know,and that for each one they would be asked whether theyknew its name. They were instructed to say ‘‘yes’’ if theyknew the name and ‘‘no’’ if they did not. They werewarned not to say anything other than ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no.’’Two practice trials with feedback were presented (‘‘Doyou know the name for this?’’ regarding one familiarand one unfamiliar object). Five familiar and five unfa-miliar test objects were presented one at a time in a ran-dom order. The familiar objects were a cup, flower,spoon, ball, and sock. The unfamiliar objects were anegg slicer, cleat wrench, device for screwing off bottlecaps, CD opener, and striped animal with cylindricalbody, four legs, and suction cup feet.

For each object, the experimenter asked, ‘‘Do youknow the name for this?’’ She responded to the child’sanswers with an occasional ‘‘OK’’ or ‘‘Good.’’ Aftereach unfamiliar object trial, if the participant hadresponded affirmatively, he or she was asked to providethe name of the object. These responses were analyzed todetermine whether the child overextended a familiarname to the unfamiliar object. If so, the trial wasexcluded from the calculation of the child’s proportionof correct yes–no judgments. (M number excluded perchild = 0.81, range = 0–3).

Syntactic acceptability judgment

This task was adapted from one developed by de Vil-liers and de Villiers (1972). Children watched a DVD inwhich the Sesame Street puppet Elmo presented three-word commands, which were either in correct orreversed word order. Elmo told the child, ‘‘In this game,I am going to say some things that are silly. I am goingto say them the wrong way around. But sometimes I amgoing to say things the right way and you have to tell.’’After Elmo uttered each sentence, the experimenterasked if Elmo had said the sentence ‘‘the right way orthe wrong way.’’ Two practice trials were administered,one involving a correctly-ordered command (Read thebook) and the other, a reverse-ordered command (Noseyour touch). After each, the experimenter asked whetherElmo had said it the right or wrong way. After the childresponded, he or she heard Elmo say whether he hadsaid it the right or wrong way. For the reverse-orderedsentence, Elmo also restated it in the correct order toillustrate the difference between a ‘‘right’’ and ‘‘wrong’’sentence.

The test sentences were presented in a random order.Five were correct (Brush your teeth/Sweep the floor/

Drink the milk/Open the door/ Throw the ball) and fivewere reverse-ordered (Dog the pat/Hands your wash/Win-

dow the close/ Hands your clap/Cookie the eat). Theexperimenter responded to the child’s answers with anoccasional ‘‘OK’’ or ‘‘Good.’’

Pseudoword repetition

The stimuli and procedures for this task were thesame as in Merriman et al. (2006), (Study 2), except thatvideo presentation by a puppet rather than audio pre-sentation by an adult was used. This change wasintended to promote attention to the stimuli. The childwatched a DVD in which a leopard puppet named Mor-ris uttered the words. The voice of Morris was a record-ing of the experimenter’s voice. To avoid a potentialMcGurk effect (McGurk & MacDonald, 1978), the pup-pet hid his face every time he said a word. The child wastold that Morris was a friendly, but shy puppet whowanted to play a game. ‘‘Morris is going to say a wordand what you have to do is say it back. You have to bean echo. I want you to try to say every word, even if thewords don’t make any sense. Just try to say what youhear Morris say.’’

Morris presented a practice word (chair) and if thechild repeated it, Morris congratulated the child. If thechild said nothing or repeated the word incorrectly,the experimenter presented an additional practice trial.Eight familiar words and eleven high-wordlike pseudo-words (roobid, grundle, diller, pennad, brastering, dope-

late, kannifer, parrazon, commeecitate, stoppogratic,

confrantual) were then presented by Morris at a rate of


one every three seconds. Most of the familiar wordswere presented first. The pseudowords were presentedin the order listed above, with an occasional familiarword intervening. Repetition of a pseudoword wasscored as incorrect by the experimenter if any of its pho-nemes was omitted, moved to a new position, orreplaced by another phoneme, or if a new phonemewas added. Word repetitions were not scored; these tri-als served as easy items that maintained the child’sengagement in the task.

Name-distinct object recognition

The child was told that he or she would be watchingpictures on the television, and should pay very closeattention because the pictures were going to go by veryfast. Thirty color pictures were presented at a rate of oneper second. Each picture was a photograph of a differenttype of familiar object taken from a children’s word-book (Wilkes, 1999). After presentation, the child wasasked to pay attention as the experimenter held up 15posters one at a time. Each poster was 11 inches by 14inches and displayed four pictures of objects from thewordbook. One to three of them had been previouslypresented on the television (targets), while the othershad not (distracters). Each distracter had a distinctname, which like the names of the targets, was familiarto the child (see Appendix A). The child was told topoint to the pictures that he or she remembered havingseen on the television screen.

Related and unrelated recall

This task was adapted from Huttenlocher and Lui(1979). The child attempted to recall lists of noun trip-lets. Four lists contained categorically-related triplets(pig–cow–horse, sand–mud–dirt, arm–leg–neck; car–bus–

train) and four contained unrelated ones (door–hat–

game, box–song–rope, wood–corn–light, tree–fan–juice).The child was told that he or she was going to watch aDVD in which Morris would be playing a ‘‘hiding gamewith words’’. The experimenter explained that Morriswould say three words at a time. The child was told torepeat the words and ‘‘catch them in your hands.’’ Theexperimenter demonstrated with a practice list (red–

blue–green), saying the words, pretending to grasp themout of the air, then telling the child to do the same. Oncethe child had pretended to grasp the words in his/herhands, the experimenter asked, ‘‘What words do youhave in your hands?’’ After recall, the child was toldwhat the words were (if necessary), then told to ‘‘Throwthe words away and get ready for new words’’.

The DVD was turned on and Morris presentedanother practice triplet (circle–square–triangle). Withencouragement and assistance (if necessary), the childrepeated the words and pretended to catch them, then

was asked to recall them. Morris told the child to throwthe words away and prepare for some more words. Forthe last practice trial (mommy–daddy–sister) and theeight test trials, a distraction activity was added. Anarray of four drawn hands was presented on the televi-sion screen three seconds after Morris finished present-ing a triplet. The three second period was enough timefor every child to repeat and ‘‘catch’’ a triplet. Eachhand in the distracter array held up a different numberof fingers. The experimenter randomly pointed to differ-ent hands, and each time asked the child, ‘‘How manyfingers are up?’’ The arrangement of the hands in thearray varied from trial to trial. On each trial, this dis-traction activity lasted seven seconds, after which thescreen went blank and the child was asked by the exper-imenter to recall the words in his or her hands. After tenseconds, a chime sounded on the DVD. Morris reap-peared on the screen and told the child to throw awaythe words and prepare to hear three new words. Fiveseconds later, the next trial began. The child receivedpraise and encouragement after each trial.

Results and discussion

Children’s judgments and memory test performanceswere analyzed for the effects of age, task, and stimulus.Gender was not a significant factor nor involved in sig-nificant interactions in any analysis. General relationsamong the measures were examined, then the link pre-dictions and distinctiveness hypotheses were evaluated.Finally, the hypothesis-generating potential of the dualcriterion account was addressed.

Effects of age, task, and stimulus

For each task, the child was scored for the propor-tion of items that was responded to correctly. For exam-ple, a child who recalled two of the twelve unrelatednouns that were presented received a score of.167 forunrelated recall. Mean scores for the younger (M = 3–4, range = 3–0 to 3–7, N = 26) and older children(M = 4–2, range = 3–8 to 4–10, N = 26) on every taskare summarized in Table 4.

Linguistic judgments

A 2 (age) · 3 (judgment) mixed analysis of varianceof the scores for the judgments yielded significant effectsof age, F(1,50) = 4.11, p < .05, g2 = .08, and judgment,F(1,50)=27.31, p < .001, g2 = .35. As in previousresearch (Chaney, 1992; Marazita & Merriman, 2004;Merriman et al., 2006; Smith & Tager-Flusberg, 1982),older children tended to make the judgments more accu-rately than younger children did. Object nameability wasjudged more accurately than word familiarity (Ms = .81and .72, respectively), which in turn was judged more

Table 4Mean proportion correct on every task by younger and olderchildren

Task Younger Older

JudgmentWord familiarity .69 (.21) .75 (.22)Object nameability .77 (.21) .86 (.18)Syntactic acceptability .54 (.16) .65 (.18)

MemoryPseudoword repetition .50 (.22) .62 (.17)Object recognition .63 (.13) .72 (.15)Related recall .33 (.16) .34 (.18)Unrelated recall .13 (.16) .19 (.15)

Notes. Standard deviations are listed in the parentheses. N = 52for every task, except the two recall tasks, where N = 33.


accurately than syntactic acceptability (M = .60). Onlythe older children made the latter judgments withabove-chance accuracy, t(25) = 4.25, p < .01. In Cha-ney’s (1992) study, 3-year-olds’ syntactic judgmentsshowed above-chance accuracy, but were not as accurateas word familiarity judgments. Both the 3- and 4-year-olds tested by Smith and Tager-Flusberg (1982) judgedsyntactic acceptability as accurately as word familiarity.Object nameability judgment was not assessed in theseinvestigations.

A procedural difference may explain the poorer syn-tactic judgment observed in the current study. In theprevious studies participants were asked to try to correctevery utterance that they judged to have been said the‘‘wrong way round.’’ This requirement may have helpedsome children to learn to better distinguish the reverse-ordered commands from the well-ordered ones duringthe test. Children were not asked to attempt correctionsin the current study because, as Hakes (1980) suggested,such attempts themselves might cause some youngstersto alter their criteria for deciding whether to accept orreject an utterance.

Memory tests

Scores on each memory test were submitted to separate2(age) one-way analyses of variance. As in previous stud-ies (Gathercole, 1995; Merriman et al., 2006), older chil-dren were better able than younger ones to repeat backhigh-wordlike pseudowords, F(1,50) = 4.86, p < .05,g2 = .09. A similar age difference was evident in name-dis-tinct object recognition, F(1,50) = 4.89, p < .05, g2 = .09.Such an age difference has been observed in previous stud-ies of object recognition (Merriman, Azmitia, & Perlmut-ter, 1988; Perlmutter & Myers, 1974, 1976).

Eleven children in the younger group and eight in theolder group did not recall a single related or unrelatedword. Because these failures could have reflected factorsother than poor recall ability, such as lack of coopera-tion or difficulty following instructions, these data were

excluded. In the remaining sample, no age difference wasevident in short-term recall of either related or unrelatednoun triplets, F < 1. Related recall was greater thanunrelated recall, F(1,31) = 25.55, p < .001, g2 = .45,consistent with previous reports (Huttenlocher & Lui,1979; Laurence, 1967; Study 2).

The null effect of age is consistent with the results ofMerriman et al. (2006) for related noun pairs. Althoughnot reported by these investigators, the correlationbetween age and total recall was.00 in their first study(df = .51) and .12 in their second (df = 46). Age was alsonot related to recall on first trials in either study (i.e., thetrials not subject to semantic PI), correlation coefficientswere �.09 and .07, respectively. Huttenlocher and Lui(1979) included a control condition in which noun pairschanged category on every recall trial. Although noanalysis of age differences was reported, 3- and 5-year-olds’ mean recall percentages, which can be computedfrom graphs in their article, were fairly similar (.48and .55, respectively).

In summary, the effects of age, task, and stimulustype were generally consistent with those previouslyreported. The only striking exception was that syntacticacceptability judgments were less accurate than in paststudies. The likely reason for the exception was that par-ticipants were not instructed to try to correct every sen-tence that they judged to be unacceptable.

General relations

Correlations among all measures, as well as Cron-bach alphas (i.e., indexes of internal consistency) foreach measure, are summarized in Table 5. (With oneexception, all significant correlations were also signifi-cant when age was partialled out. The exception wasthat between name-distinct object recognition andpseudoword repetition, r(49) = .19, p > .10.) The linguis-tic judgments were moderately intercorrelated, replicat-ing previous results (Chaney, 1992; Marazita &Merriman, 2004; Merriman et al., 2006; Smith &Tager-Flusberg, 1982). Low reliability may have attenu-ated the correlations involving syntactic acceptabilityjudgment, as its Cronbach alpha was lower than thatfor the other two judgments.

The memory measures tended to be independent ofone another, although low reliability of some of themeasures may have attenuated correlations. The onlysignificant correlations involved object recognition,which was weakly related to pseudoword repetitionand fairly strongly related to recall of related nouns.As Merriman et al. (2006) had found, a hypothesizedmeasure of phonological WM efficiency, pseudowordrepetition, was unrelated to a hypothesized measure ofsemantic retrieval, which in the current case was relatedrecall. No other studies have examined relations amongthese memory measures in preschool-age children.

Table 5Intercorrelations among tasks

TASK 2 3 4 5 6 7

Judgment1. Word familiarity (.86) .51* .33* .48* .26 .41* .122. Object nameability (.89) .37* .50* .14 .58* .113. Syntactic acceptability (.48) .38* .09 .23 .32

Memory4. Pseudoword repetition (.52) .06 .29* .105. Related recall (.49) .46* .236. Object recognition (.88) .267. Unrelated recall (.56)

Notes. *Two-tailed p < .05.df = 50 for all correlations, except ones involving recall, where df = 31.

Cronbach alphas for each measure are listed in parentheses.


Regarding judgment-memory relations, children’ssuccess in repeating back pseudowords was positivelycorrelated with each linguistic judgment. This result isconsistent with the claim of the dual criterion accountthat an efficient phonological WM promotes acquisitionof the cue recognition criteria for word familiarity andsyntactic acceptability judgment by some children. How-ever, as specified in link predictions 2 and 4 (Table 3),these hypothesized effects should only be evident amongthose who lag behind in the memory processes that sup-port learning the target generation criteria for thesejudgments (see next Section).

The correlation between pseudoword repetition andobject nameability judgment was unexpected. Thesemeasures were not found to be correlated by Merrimanet al. (2006), (Study 1). This unexpected result will beaddressed in the discussion of the results of tests of thedistinctiveness hypotheses.

No judgment was associated with recall of eitherrelated or unrelated nouns. If the dual criterion accountis valid, these null correlations mask significant judg-ment-recall relations in those whose phonological WMis rather poor (link predictions 1 and 3).

The link predictions

The primary evaluation of the dual criteria accountconcerned the five predicted links between judgmentand memory. Because the first four link predictions(see Table 3) distinguished between subgroups that per-formed well versus poorly on some memory test, mediansplits were used to classify individuals as scoring high orlow on memory tests. Those scoring at the median wereassigned to whichever subgroup resulted in more evenlybalanced sample sizes. The relevant correlations aresummarized in Table 6. The link prediction for objectnameability judgment (prediction 5 in Table 3) was eval-uated by examining the correlation between this judg-

ment and name-distinct object recognition in the entiresample. As detailed below, all predictions were sup-ported. (All were also supported in an analysis of age-partialled correlations, which are not reported here.)

Link prediction 1: Word familiarity judgment and

semantic retrieval

As predicted, the accuracy of word familiarity judg-ment was related to recall of related nouns among chil-dren who performed below the median on the test ofpseudoword repetition, but not among those who per-formed above the median on this test. This finding rep-licates a result reported by Merriman et al. (2006), butwith a different measure of semantic retrieval.

According to the dual criterion account, those chil-dren whose phonological WM operates rather ineffi-ciently learn to judge word familiarity only if familiarwords tend to evoke the retrieval of large amounts ofsemantic information. The more information retrieved,as measured by recall of related nouns, the more readilythey learn to judge whether any particular word is onethey know by whether or not they retrieve its meaning.The inefficiency of their phonological WM, as indicatedby low pseudoword repetition scores, keeps them fromlearning the alternative criterion for this judgment.

The null relation between word familiarity judgmentand related recall among children with high phonologi-cal WM is consistent with the second part of link predic-tion 1. Because WM processes that support acquisitionof the word form recognition criterion are sufficientlydeveloped in this group, the nature of their semanticretrieval processes, which supports learning the otherjudgment criterion, does not affect how accurately theymake the judgment.

An alternative explanation is that the word familiar-ity judgments of the high phonological WM group hadnear-ceiling accuracy, and so restriction of range attenu-

Table 6Intercorrelations relevant to the link predictions

Judgment–memory link Groups

Low phonological WM High phonological WMWord familiarity—Related recall .56*(15) �.07 (14)

Low semantic retrieval High semantic retrievalWord familiarity—Pseudo repetition .50*(14) �.03 (15)

Low phonological WM High phonological WMSyntactic accept—Unrelated recall .59*(15) �.01 (14)

Weak semantic integration Strong semantic integr.Syntactic accept—Pseudo repetition .55*(14) .29 (15)

All childrenObject nameability—Object recognition 58* (50)

Notes. The coefficients that were predicted to be significant are boldfaced.*Two-tailed p < .05.df are listed in parentheses.


ated the correlation between the judgments and relatedrecall in this group. Judgment accuracy was somewhatgreater in the high than in the low groups (Ms = .79and .71, respectively). However, variability was compa-rable (SDs = .19 and .20, respectively), and so too wasinternal consistency (Cronbach as = .76 and .82,respectively).

The internal consistency of related recall was nothigh (Cronbach a = .49), due in part to near-floor recallof the body part words (arm, leg, neck). Seventy-threepercent of the children recalled none of these words.When related recall scores were recomputed with this listremoved, internal consistency increased and was compa-rable for the low and high phonological WM groups(Cronbach as = .56 and .53, respectively). When thisrecall measure was used, link prediction 1 was stillupheld; the measure was related to word familiarityjudgment in the low phonological WM group,r(15) = .59, p < .05, but not in the high phonologicalWM group, r(14)= � .20, NS.

Link prediction 2: Word familiarity judgment and

phonological WM

As predicted, word familiarity judgment was relatedto pseudoword repetition among children who per-formed below the median on the related recall test, butnot among those who performed well on this test.According to the dual criterion account, children forwhom familiar words evoke only small amounts ofsemantic information learn to judge word familiarityaccurately only if their processes for storing word formsin WM are well-developed. An efficient phonologicalWM promotes their learning to judge a word to beknown based on whether they recognize its sound form.Their low levels of semantic retrieval, as indicated bytheir poorer related recall, make it unlikely that thisgroup will have learned the alternative target generationcriterion for this judgment.

The null correlation between word familiarity judg-ment and pseudoword repetition among the high seman-tic retrievers, which is consistent with the second part oflink prediction 2, is attributed by the dual criterionaccount to the tendency for many in this group to learnthe target generation criterion. The efficiency of theirphonological WM processes, which affects learning theother criterion, does not affect how quickly they learnto judge a word to be known based on whether or notthey retrieve its meaning.

Support for the second part of link prediction 2 maybe a result of restriction of range and low reliability inthe word familiarity judgment and pseudoword repeti-tion scores of the high semantic retrieval group, how-ever. Regarding judgment scores, variability wassomewhat lower in the high than in the low groups(SDs = .18 and .20, respectively), and so too was inter-nal consistency (Cronbach as = .71 and .84, respec-tively). Regarding pseudoword repetition scores,variability and internal consistency were substantiallylower in the high than in the low group (SDs = .14and .22, respectively; Cronbach as = .15 and .70,respectively).

Link prediction 3: Syntactic acceptability judgment and

semantic integration

As predicted, syntactic acceptability judgment wassignificantly correlated with recall of unrelated nounstriplets among those who performed poorly on the testof pseudoword repetition, but not among those who per-formed well on this test. According to the dual criterionaccount, the first groups’ processes for encoding andstoring the sequence of word forms in a sentence arenot sufficiently developed for them to learn the sentenceform recognition procedure for judging syntactic accept-ability. They learn to make such judgments accuratelyonly if their processes for constructing and retrievingthe semantic relations expressed in sentences are well-


developed. Efficiency in the latter processes promoteslearning the meaning generation criterion for suchjudgments.

The null relation between syntactic acceptabilityjudgment and recall of unrelated nouns among highphonological children, which is consistent with the sec-ond part of link prediction 3, is attributed by the dualcriterion account to the advanced sentence form mem-ory of this group. Those with highly efficient phonolog-ical WM tend to learn the sentence form recognitionprocedure for judging syntactic acceptability. Thus, thestrength of their semantic integration tendencies, whichbears on learning the other criterion, is unrelated tothe accuracy of their syntactic acceptability judgments.

Variability and internal consistency were lower inthe unrelated recall scores of the high phonologicalWM group than the low phonological WM group(SDs = .11 and .18, respectively; Cronbach as = .09and .73, respectively). The two groups did not differmuch in this regard in their judgment scores(SDs = .19 and .18, respectively; Cronbach as = .54and .48, respectively). So although the null correlationbetween unrelated recall and syntactic judgment in thehigh phonological WM group is consistent with thesecond part of link prediction 3, it could also reflectthe unreliability of the unrelated recall scores in thisgroup.

Support for the first part of link prediction 3 consti-tutes indirect evidence for the validity of our novel claimabout preschool recall. Young children’s recall of a shortlist of unrelated nouns after a brief period of interferingverbal activity was hypothesized to reflect the strength oftheir tendency to integrate the meanings of words in asequence. Our finding that the level of such recall wasassociated with how accurately the low phonologicalWM group judged syntactic acceptability is consistentwith this hypothesis, assuming that the higher levels ofaccuracy in this group were achieved through the useof the sentence meaning generation criterion.

Link prediction 4: Syntactic acceptability judgment and

phonological WM

Consistent with the fourth link prediction, syntacticacceptability judgment was significantly correlated withpseudoword repetition among children who performedpoorly on the unrelated recall test, but not among thosewho performed well on this test. According to the dualcriterion account, semantic integration processes in thepoor recallers are not sufficiently developed for themto have learned to use the sentence meaning generationprocedure for judging syntactic acceptability. So theytend to learn to make such judgments accurately onlyif their processes for encoding and storing word forms(and sequential relations among them) in WM arewell-developed. Efficiency in such processes promotes

learning to use the sentence form recognition criterionfor judging whether a sentence has been said ‘‘the rightor wrong way around.’’ As already argued, althoughpseudowords are not sentences, evidence supports inter-preting the ability to repeat them as an indication of theefficiency of sentence form encoding and storage pro-cesses (Gathercole et al., 1999).

The null relation found between pseudoword repeti-tion and syntactic acceptability judgment among thosewho recalled unrelated nouns the most successfullywas also predicted by the dual criterion account. Thisresult conforms to the second part of the link prediction4. Because the semantic integration tendencies that sup-port acquisition of the target generation procedure aresufficiently developed in these children, the level ofdevelopment of the form memory processes that supportacquisition of the cue recognition procedure should notaffect how quickly they learn to make this judgment.

Reliability may constitute a viable alternative expla-nation for the null correlation in the high unrelatedrecall group. Although the variability and internal con-sistency in the judgment scores of this group were some-what greater than in the low unrelated recall group(SDs = .21 and .17, respectively; Cronbach as = .59and .47, respectively), a much greater difference in theopposite direction was evident in the pseudoword repe-tition scores of these groups (SDs = .13 and .22, respec-tively; Cronbach as = .07 and .72, respectively).

For link predictions 2, 3, and 4, those who performedwell on one of the two memory measures referenced bythe prediction tended to show low internal consistency intheir performance on the other memory measure. Onepossible explanation for this phenomenon is that theinternal consistency in children’s performance dropswhen they must shift away from their usual way ofencoding words. For example, a child who usually paysmore attention to word meaning than to word formwould do well to concentrate on form in the pseudowordrepetition task because the stimuli have no meaning.Inconsistency may arise in a particular memory testbecause a more adaptive, but less habitual attentionalact conflicts with a less adaptive, but more habitualattentional act. Because of this conflict, children maywaver in their relative attention to form and meaningfrom trial to trial.

As already noted, low reliability of measurement maybe the real reason that the results predicted by the sec-ond parts of links predictions 2, 3, and 4 were obtained.However, the pattern of reliability results is not a com-plete disappointment with respect to the dual criterionaccount because it does demonstrate a valuable charac-teristic of the account, namely, the potential to generatemeaningful new hypotheses. By testing the account, thereliability pattern was discovered, and hypotheses aboutthe nature of children’s habitual and non-habitual actsof attention were generated.


Link prediction 5: Object nameability judgment and

name-distinct object recognition

As predicted by the dual criterion account, objectnameability judgment was positively correlated withname-distinct object recognition in the entire sample ofchildren. According to the dual criterion account, thosewith better-developed visual object recognition pro-cesses should outperform their peers on the recognitiontest and also be more likely to have learned the objectrecognition procedure for judging object nameability.Likewise, those with better-developed object nameretrieval processes should outperform their peers onthe recognition test and be more likely to have learnedthe name retrieval procedure for judging objectnameability.

Although each of the hypothesized memory processesmay account for substantial variability in name-distinctobject recognition performance, it is possible that onlyone does. Thus, although the fifth link predictionderived from the dual criterion account was supported,the results are also compatible with single criterionaccounts of object nameability judgment. The initialdevelopment of this judgment in early childhood coulddepend entirely on acquisition of the object recognitioncriterion for making the judgment, which in turn,depends on the development of visual object recognitionprocesses alone. Alternatively, development of the judg-ment could depend entirely on acquisition of the nameretrieval criterion, which in turn, depends on the devel-opment of name retrieval processes alone. An importantdirection for future research will be to develop memorytests that rely differentially on visual object recognitionprocesses and name retrieval processes, and administerthese to preschool-age children so as to decide amongthe various models.

Distinctiveness hypotheses

The distinctiveness hypotheses not only presume thatthe dual criterion account is valid, but also that various

Table 7Correlation coefficients relevant to the distinctiveness hypotheses

Group Memory N

W

Low phonological WM Related recall 17Low sementic retrievel Pseudoword 16Low phonological WM Unrelated recall 17Weak sementic integration Pseudoword 16All children Object recognition 52

Notes. The coefficients that were hypothesized to be significant are boCronbach’s alphas for the judgments are listed in parentheses.* Two-tailed p < .05.

pairs of memory processes are independent of oneanother in particular groups of children. Any result thatsupports such a hypothesis is therefore evidence for thevalidity of both the dual criterion account and the mem-ory independence assumption. Any result that is incom-patible with such a hypothesis may reflect an error in thedual criterion account and/or derive from a relationbetween memory processes.

Correlational results were consistent with distinctive-ness hypotheses 1, 3, and 5, but not 2 or 4 (the data ineach row of Table 7 corresponds with a different hypoth-esis). In the case of the odd-numbered hypotheses, a par-ticular memory measure was more strongly correlatedwith the linguistic judgment specified by the dual crite-rion account than with the other two linguistic judg-ments. Regarding hypothesis 1, the results replicateand extend Merriman et al. (2006)’s finding that amongchildren with low levels of phonological WM, magni-tude of semantic retrieval correlates more strongly withword familiar judgment than with object nameabilityjudgment.

The support for hypotheses 1, 3, and 5 challenges thesufficiency of global explanations of the early develop-ment of linguistic judgment. These findings are not con-sistent with the possibility that the particular memoryabilities referenced by these hypotheses just happen tobe associated with some global skill, such as linguisticdecentration (Hakes, 1980), or some type of knowledgethat is important for linguistic judgment in general. Ifthis were true, the memory measures would have beenfound to be related to all three judgments.

Support for distinctiveness hypotheses 1, 3, and 5 isalso not likely an artifact of variable reliability in the lin-guistic judgments over the various subgroups of chil-dren. The strongest correlation did not always involvethe judgment with the greatest internal consistency(Cronbach alpha for each judgment in each group isreported in parentheses in Table 7). Also, despite thegenerally lower consistency of syntactic acceptabilityjudgment, there was no evidence that its correlationswith other measures were attenuated by low cross-situa-

Judgment

ord Fam. Syntac acceptability Object nameability

.56*(.82) .26 (.48) .11 (.86)

.50*(.84) .55* (.21) .59* (.79)

.29 (.82) .59* (.48) .20 (.86)

.34 (.84) .58* (.47) .61* (.82).41* (.86) .23 (.48) .58* (.89)

ldfaced.


tional reliability. The Cronbach alpha statistic likelyunderestimates the cross-situational reliability of thisjudgment. (The test-retest reliability of this judgmentwould need to be assessed to evaluate this possibility.)

The unsupported distinctiveness hypotheses wereboth instances in which the correlations involvingpseudoword repetition were not as predicted. Withinthe low semantic retrieval subgroup, the repetitionmeasure was expected to be more strongly related toword familiarity judgment than to the other judg-ments (by hypothesis 2). The measure was found tobe approximately equally related to all three. Thehigher-than-expected correlation with syntactic accept-ability judgment may have been due to samplingerror. The dual criterion account and memory inde-pendence assumption jointly imply that a positive,but smaller correlation should be found for this judg-ment in this particular subgroup. If semantic retrievaland semantic integration are independent memoryskills, as the weak correlation found between relatedand unrelated recall implies, then roughly half of thechildren in the low semantic retrieval subgroup shouldbe weak semantic integrators and half should bestrong ones. By link prediction 4, a strong correlationshould obtain among the weak integrators and aweak-at-best correlation should obtain among thestrong integrators. If the data reported in the fourthline of Table 6 are used to estimate these two correla-tions (.55 and .29, respectively), the correlation coeffi-cient for combination of these two groups would beexpected to be .43 (i.e., the result of finding the meanFisher-transformed values of.55 and .29, then convert-ing the mean to a Pearson correlation coefficient).This expected value does not deviate that much fromthe coefficient for the relation in the low semanticretrieval subgroup (.55).

The substantial correlation between pseudoword rep-etition and object nameability judgment among the lowsemantic retrievers (contra distinctiveness hypothesis 2)and among the weak semantic integrators (contra dis-tinctiveness hypothesis 4) is another matter. By the dualcriterion account and memory independence assump-tion, at most only a weak correlation should have beenfound in either subgroup.

Merriman et al. (2006) had found pseudoword repe-tition to be more strongly correlated with word familiar-ity judgment than object nameability judgment within alow semantic retrieval group, which is consistent withdistinctiveness hypothesis 2. Sampling error may partlyexplain the discrepancy between this finding and the cur-rent one. However, even when the results of these twostudies are pooled, the average correlation betweenobject nameability judgment and pseudoword repetitionin the low semantic retrieval group is.48, p < .001.

We propose that greater-than-expected correlationsreflect a violation of the memory independence assump-

tion rather than a problem in the dual criterion account.More specifically, we propose that the efficiency of pho-nological WM, which promotes learning the form recog-nition criteria for judging word familiarity and syntacticacceptability, is directly related to the efficiency of objectname retrieval, which promotes learning the targetretrieval criterion for judging object nameability (seeTable 2).

This conjecture is consistent with Baddeley and col-leagues’ view that the primary function of phonologicalSTM (which is the storage component of phonologicalWM) is language learning (Baddeley, Gathercole, &Papagno, 1998). According to this view, the reason thatpseudoword repetition scores predict rate of vocabularygrowth in early childhood is that the more efficientlychildren store instances of spoken words in workingmemory, the more rapidly the accessibility, or retriev-ability, of the LTM representations of these word formsincreases. This argument implies that higher pseudo-word repetition scores should also be associated withgreater word or name retrieval efficiency.

An argument can also be made for the reverse causalrelationship between pseudoword repetition and wordretrieval efficiency. Only high-wordlike pseudowordswere used in the current test because most of the novelwords that children hear are ‘‘wordlike.’’ High-wordlikepseudowords are repeated back more readily than low-wordlike ones (Gathercole, 1995; Merriman et al.,2006) presumably because they receive top-down sup-port from LTM representations of similar-soundingfamiliar words. Therefore, it is likely that those childrenwhose LTM representations of familiar word forms arethe most accessible should tend to be better able torepeat back high-wordlike pseudowords.

The hypothesis generation potential of the dual criterion

account

The dual criterion account yielded numerous hypoth-eses about memory-judgment correlations that wereevaluated in the current study. The hypothesis-generat-ing potential of the account goes well beyond this dem-onstration, however.

One general claim that is based on the account andcan be tested experimentally is that only the judgmentsof those who use a cue recognition criterion should beinfluenced by experiences that undermine the validityof the cue. Suppose various unfamiliar words were pre-sented repeatedly to children in a situation that did notprovide information about the words’ meanings, forexample. This experience should increase the likelihoodthat those who rely on the word form recognition crite-rion would later judge that they know what these wordsmean (because the words evoke a recognition response),but should not affect the accuracy of those who use theword meaning generation criterion to make this judg-


ment. Analogous experiments involving preexposure tounfamiliar types of stimuli could be conducted for objectnameability and syntactic acceptability judgments.

Another claim from the account that can be testedexperimentally is that only the judgments of those whouse the target generation criterion should be influencedby experiences that impede or facilitate the target gener-ation process. As just one example, requiring children toengage in an oral task, such as counting, should reducetheir accuracy in a concurrent object nameability judg-ment task to a greater extent if they use the name retrie-val criterion than if they use the object recognitioncriterion.

Some of these hypotheses can be extended to novelnoun mapping. Children’s tendency to select an unfamil-iar over a familiar kind of object as the referent of anunfamiliar name can be undermined by preexposingthe unfamiliar object (Merriman et al., 1989; Merriman& Schuster, 1991). Children who rely on object recogni-tion, rather than name retrieval, to judge object nameab-lity may be especially susceptible to this effect.Conversely, the mapping of those who rely on nameretrieval might be more adversely affected if the familiarobjects in the mapping paradigm were replaced byobjects that had names that were recognizable, but couldnot be recalled (e.g., a child might be able to recognizethe word stethoscope, but not be able to recall its name).

Another promising direction for expanding thedomain of the dual criterion account is to examinewhether the individual differences identified by theaccount persist into later childhood or even adulthood.For example, delayed recall of lists of categorically-related words may predict adults’ ability to judgewhether they recognize the definitions of various low fre-quency words, especially among adults with below-aver-age phonological WM efficiency. Also, individualdifferences in the memory processes that are central tothe account may well be continuous with individual dif-ferences in processes that have been identified as under-lying second language learning aptitude in older childrenand adults (Ehrman, 1998; Ellis & Sinclair, 1996; Ske-han, 2002).

The dual criterion account has the potential to gener-ate claims regarding other kinds of metalinguistic cogni-tion. Compared to children who use the formrecognition criterion for word familiarity judgment,those who use the meaning generation criterion maybe able to provide definitions (i.e., verbalized meanings)for a greater percentage of the words that they say theyknow. On the other hand, children who use the recogni-tion criterion may make more accurate ‘‘feeling ofknowing’’ judgments regarding whether they could rec-ognize the name for an object that they cannot currentlyrecall (Cultice, Somerville, & Wellman, 1983).

The account could also be extended to judgments oflinguistic similarity. Suppose children were asked to

judge which of two sentences (e.g., The car hit the truck

and The car was hit by the truck) was more similar to astimulus sentence (e.g., The truck was hit by the car).Those who use sentence form recognition to judge syn-tactic acceptability may give greater relative weight tosyntactic similarity (which favors The car was hit by

the truck) than to semantic similarity (which favorsThe car hit the truck) in this judgment compared to chil-dren who use sentence meaning generation to judge syn-tactic acceptability.

The dual criterion account can generate novelhypotheses about the nature of early memory and itsdevelopment. For example, given the account’s novelclaim that unrelated recall reflects the strength of seman-tic integration tendencies, it is reasonable to hypothesizethat unrelated recall (as well as syntactic acceptabilityjudgment) should be positively correlated with thestrength of the anterior N400 event-related potentialcomponent among those with low levels of phonologicalWM. This component has been shown to be evoked inyoung children by semantic incongruence or unrelated-ness (Friedrich & Friederici, 2004; Torkildsen et al.,2007).

Regarding developmental change in memory, if theaccount’s interpretation of unrelated and related recallis valid, then the absence of age differences in thesememory tasks (see Table 3) would seem to imply thatneither semantic retrieval nor semantic integrationincrease over the preschool years. Yet knowledge ofword and sentence meaning must increase as a conse-quence of children’s experience producing and compre-hending more and more language. So why do semanticretrieval and semantic integration appear not to increaseas well?

In keeping with the dual criterion account, wepropose that just as individual differences exist inhow children make linguistic judgments, they alsoexist in how children encode and later attempt torecall short lists of words (e.g., noun triplets). Somechildren primarily experience retrieval of semanticinformation about each word, whereas others primar-ily engage in semantic integration. (Although seman-tic integration requires some word meaning retrieval,it primarily involves constructing a grammatical caserelation such as agent-patient between words.)Whether the names in a short sequence are categori-cally-related or not, hearing the names causes somechildren to primarily experience semantic retrieval,and to engage in little semantic integration. For otherchildren, the sequence evokes the opposite response—more semantic integration and less semantic retrieval.The first type of response promotes superior recall ofrelated names, but poorer recall of unrelated names.The second type of response promotes poorer recallof related names, but superior recall of unrelatednames.


If these hypotheses are valid, then among those chil-dren who receive below-the-median scores on unrelatedrecall (i.e., among those who allegedly engaged in lesssemantic integration), related recall should be positivelycorrelated with age. Within this subgroup, the greatersemantic knowledge that the older children have accu-mulated should cause them to experience more semanticretrieval than younger children, and so recall morerelated names than them. This prediction was confirmed,r(14)=.62, p < .01, g2 = .40. Likewise, among childrenwho allegedly experienced little semantic retrieval, asreflected in their below-the-median scores on relatedrecall, unrelated recall should be positively correlatedwith age. In this subgroup, the greater syntactic knowl-edge and experience in interpreting sentences that theolder ones have accumulated should make them morelikely, and better able, to integrate the unrelated namessemantically, and so recall more of these names than theyounger children. This prediction was also confirmed,r(14)=.45, one-tailed p < .03, g2 = .20. (A one-tailed testseems appropriate given that the prediction is generatedby a hypothesis, and that there are no grounds for pre-dicting that recall of unrelated names declines with age.)These findings further demonstrate the potential of thedual criterion account to generate hypotheses whichmay lead to important discoveries about children’scognition.

Although the dual criterion account has great poten-tial, the evidence currently available for evaluating itsclaims consists entirely of concurrent correlations. Lon-gitudinal correlational studies, training studies, andexperiments are needed to further evaluate and refinethe account. The least improvement over time in theaccuracy of a judgment should be observed among thosewho show low levels of efficiency in both of the memoryprocesses that allegedly promote acquisition of the judg-ment’s criteria. Youngsters who show high levels of effi-ciency in one of the two memory processes that arerelated to a judgment, but have not yet learned to makethe judgment accurately, should be more responsive totraining in the use of the criterion that their more effi-cient memory process supports than to training in theuse of the other criterion.

Conclusions

A new theory of the development of linguistic judg-ment in early childhood was presented. The theory,which expanded upon Merriman et al. (2006)’s dual cri-terion account of word familiarity judgment, has severalimportant features. Unlike other accounts, it focuses onthe procedures young children first learn for making lin-guistic judgments, and posits individual differences inthese procedures. The theory also integrates the proce-dures into a general dual-criterion framework. Whether

judging the familiarity of a word, the nameability of anobject, or the syntactic acceptability of a sentence, pre-school-age children are hypothesized to use either acue recognition or target generation procedure. Somebase their judgment on whether they recognize a rele-vant presented cue, whereas others decide based onwhether they retrieve and/or construct what they havebeen asked to verify (i.e., a word meaning, an objectname, or a sentence interpretation).

Another unique feature of the theory is the claim thatindividual differences in the quality of specific memoryprocesses have a direct causal impact on the particularprocedure that a child first adopts for a particular lin-guistic judgment, and on how quickly the child comesto adopt the procedure. The dual criterion account isas much a theory of individual differences in early basicmemory processes as a theory of individual differences inhow early linguistic judgments are made.

The account was evaluated by testing five predictionsconcerning specific memory-judgment correlations in 3-and 4-year-olds. All of these predictions were supported.These results, which replicate and extend those of a pre-vious investigation (Merriman et al., 2006), constituteimportant validity evidence for the pairs of criteria pro-posed for each judgment, for the memory processhypothesized to promote acquisition of each criterion,and for the methods used to measure each memory pro-cess. Confirmation of the predictions also provides indi-rect validation of the claim that the level of developmentof a memory process affects children’s ability to reflecton its products (Gombert, 1992; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992).

In contrast to global accounts, the dual criterionaccount implies that early linguistic judgments are inde-pendent of each other to the extent that the memoryabilities that support the judgments are independent ofeach other. Five distinctiveness hypotheses that werejointly derived from the dual criterion account and theassumption of memory independence were tested. Threewere supported (the odd-numbered ones in Table 3),thus providing further validation of the account as wellas evidence that certain pairs of memory processes areindependent in early childhood.

Regarding the two distinctiveness hypotheses thatwere not supported, an important direction for futureresearch will be to test the proposal that a strong asso-ciation between phonological WM and name retrievalefficiency is the reason that children who tend to learnthe form recognition criteria for word familiarity andsyntactic acceptability judgment also tend to learn thename retrieval criterion for object nameability judg-ment. This proposal is just one among many hypothe-ses that can be derived by applying the dual criterionaccount to empirical findings. These hypotheses, ifvalid, would reveal new structure in children’s memoryand linguistic judgment. They merit the attention offuture research.

Appendix A

Depicted objects used in the name-distinct object recognition test


Targets
Distracters
Teddy bear
Bike Toast Light bulb Bucket Kite Blocks Clock Umbrella Fork Shirt Doll Snake Duck Cookies Pencil Cards Crayons Gloves Apple Dress Toilet paper Hammer Airplane Leaves Shark Shovel Pillow Toothbrush Milk Cat Ice cream Elephant Sunglasses Rocks Boat Twig Lion Boots Butterfly Balloon Fish Cheeries Pants Guitar Paper Cheese Towel Lamp Sneakers Bug Radio Carrot Jump rope Sheep Phone Jacket Vacuum Banana Grapes
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A dual criterion account of the development of linguistic judgment in early childhood