Literacy news
Word acquisition not as easy as previously thought
13 Sep 2010
Kent Child Development Unit has found that five-year-olds often make mistakes while learning new words which describe actions.
The study showed that when a group of five-year-olds were shown a video of an action and then given a new word to describe that action, like “blicking” for headbutting, they only identified the same action in a different video and context correctly 50 per cent of the time. According to researchers this would indicate that the children were guessing a substantial amount of the time because they had either forgotten the meaning of the word or had incorrectly identified the word as relating to the object and not the action.
The researchers suspect that this shows that children forget, quite quickly, the words for specific types of actions and are looking into just how quickly they are forgotten.
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