This study examined effects of lexical status and neighborhood density of constituent syllables on children's nonword repetition and interactions with nonword length. Lexical status of the target syllable impacted repetition accuracy for the longest nonwords. In addition, children made more errors that changed a nonword syllable to a word syllable…

Three experiments explored young children's metalinguistic awareness. Results showed that children between the ages of 4.5 and 6.5 demonstrate vigorous development of word segmentation skills, using increasingly complex strategies--first phrasal, then syllabic, and finally a full word strategy, and a growing knowledge of function and content…

Examines a task that can be applied in a uniform fashion across different languages to compare levels of vocabulary development in foreign-language learning. Results indicate that the lexical decision task can be a useful tool for the assessment and cross-linguistic comparison of lexical development in foreign-language learning. (37 references)…