The Early Lexicons of Normal and Language-Disordered Children: Developmental and Training Considerations

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses a number of issues of lexical development that have come under investigative scrutiny and discusses the implications of these issues for the management of children having difficulties acquiring language. The language-disordered children begin using words later and acquire new words at a slower pace than language normal children. Language-disordered children seem to express the same semantic notions in their single-word speech as do younger normal children, and such children may be either referential or more social in their lexical orientation, as seems to be the case for language normal children. Language-disordered children may vocalize less frequently prior to the onset of words and, therefore, may tend not to use prelexical vocalizations to communicate their intentions. Similarly, language-disordered children have difficulties encoding linguistically the most informative elements of situations, relying instead on the use of gestures. The limited evidence available concerning the relationship between word comprehension and production in language-disordered children has resulted in a general lack of agreement concerning whether word comprehension should serve as a training focus prior to word production training, simultaneous with production training, or to the exclusion of production training.