An Investigation of a Structuring Model for the Acquisition of Semantic Structures by Young Children

Abstract

This study, which was motivated by pedagogical needs, examined the development of semantic structures in children aged 6 to 1l years. A series of experiments used the judgement of nearness of meaning of terms, and free recall of word associations, as the tasks. It was hypothesised that, because of the length of the developmental processes in children, different stages would be observed in the judgement of meaning tasks and also that the associated strength between related pairs of words would increasingly facilitate the children's performances. Further, it was hypothesised that this developmental pattern could be traced by an investigation of the storage of meaning relationships. In the first two experiments, investigations were carried out into children's ability to retrieve the logical organisation of three semantic fields by using Miller's(1969) method for judging meaning relationships. Cluster analysis was employed to arrange the data and the results showed that the children's Hierarchical Cluster Schemes(HCS) became more stable with age and these gradually approximated models of the semantic fields. Three stages were discerned..in both. these experiments. in. the characteristic progression of the hierarchy. Opposite or complimentary terms were paired as closest in meaning initially, and these were then merged or joined by another term. The final strong clusters of the oldest group resembled these mantic field models. The third experiment, using free recall of meaning associations, employed two lists each containing six pairs of words selected according to linguistic categories and controlled for associated strength. The results of a free recall task using this experimental material demonstrated that age, linguistic category and associative strengths were Significant variables. Relative high associative strengths enhanced recall whereas when the associated strength was low, words did not occur in adjacent positions in recall. The general conclusion from this research is that children's ability to judge closeness of meaning relationships increases with age and this ability is also associated with their appreciation of the structure of semantic fields. The HCS's obtained from the subject's 'judgement' performances contained an initial pairing of terms definable by logical -linguistic categories. Other similarly defined linguistic pairs become increasingly secure in long term memory with age. This security in long term memory is also related to associated strength of the verbal material. The research demonstrated a possible structuring model for the learning of the meaning of related words during the acquisition of semantic fields.