Papers by William Merriman
Language Learning and Development, 2010
An explicit awareness of gaps in one's vocabulary plays an important role in older children's wor... more An explicit awareness of gaps in one's vocabulary plays an important role in older children's word learning and reading comprehension, and may also influence language processing in younger children. The current investigation addressed how preschool-age children identify gaps in their knowledge of object labels. In two studies, preschoolers answered general questions about various depicted objects, then later judged whether they knew names for these and other objects. In each study, participants were more likely to mistakenly report knowing a name for an unnameable object if they had been asked questions about it, or similar objects, earlier in the session. This pre-exposure effect is evidence that cues other than name retrieval itself can influence children's name knowledge judgments. In 4 ½ -year-olds (Study 1), the pre-exposure effect was found only among those with smaller vocabularies, whereas in 3 ½-year-olds (Study 2), it was found only among those with larger vocabularies. The reasons why the pre-exposure effect shows a U-shaped relation to vocabulary size are discussed. Name Knowledge Judgment 3 Verifying One's Knowledge of a Name Without Retrieving It:
Journal of Memory and Language, 2004
... Recently, Doherty (2000) found two tasks, synonym and homonym judgment, to be strongly relate... more ... Recently, Doherty (2000) found two tasks, synonym and homonym judgment, to be strongly related to each other, as well as to the understanding of false belief in preschool-age children. The place of awareness of lexical ignorance in these taxonomies is unknown. ...
Journal of Memory and Language, 2008
Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target ge... more Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target generation, to make several linguistic judgments. When deciding whether a word is one they know, for example, some were expected to consider whether they recognized its sound form (cue recognition), whereas others were expected to consider whether a meaning came to mind (target generation). The particular criterion that a child adopted was predicted to depend on the efficiency of the phonological or semantic memory processes that supported its use. Fifty-two preschoolers made three linguistic judgments (word familiarity, syntactic acceptability, and object nameability) and received four memory tests. Five correlations between specific memory measures and specific judgments were predicted by the dual criterion account. Five hypotheses about the distinctiveness of these correlations were also tested. The results supported the five predictions as well as three of the distinctiveness hypotheses. The potential of the account for generating new hypotheses about memory and metalinguistic awareness in early childhood was also demonstrated.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2009
In three experiments, preschoolers' ability to predict their picture recall was examined. Childre... more In three experiments, preschoolers' ability to predict their picture recall was examined. Children studied 10 pictures, predicted how many they would recall, and then attempted to recall them. This study-prediction-recall trial was repeated multiple times with new pictures on each trial. In Experiment 1, children were overconfident on the initial trial, and this overconfidence persisted across three trials. In Experiment 2, children predicted either their own performance or another child's performance. Their predictions were overconfident across all trials regardless of whether they made predictions for themselves or for another child, suggesting that wishful thinking cannot fully account for their overconfidence. In Experiment 3, some children postdicted their previous recall performance prior to making each prediction. Although their postdictions were quite accurate, their predictions were still overconfident across five trials. Preschoolers' overconfidence was remarkably resistant to the repeated experience of recalling fewer pictures than the children had predicted. Even asking them to report the number that they recalled on a previous trial, which they could do accurately, did not cause them to lower their predictions across trials.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2008
Word familiarity judgment may be important for word learning, yet little is known about how child... more Word familiarity judgment may be important for word learning, yet little is known about how children make this judgment. We hypothesized that preschool-age children differ in the judgment criteria that they use and that this difference derives from individual differences in basic memory processes. Those who have superior phonological working memory, but who retrieve less semantic information than their peers, base the judgment on whether they recognize a word's sound form. Those who show the opposite memory profile base the judgment on whether they retrieve a word's meaning. The results of two studies of 3-and 4year-olds were consistent with these claims. Among those performing poorly on one memory measure, judgment accuracy was directly related to performance on the other memory measure. These memory-judgment relations were also found to be highly specific. This is the first investigation to demonstrate the usefulness of an individual differences approach for identifying relations between linguistic judgment processes and basic memory processes during early childhood.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1996
Children tend to select novel objects over familiar ones as the likely referents of novel nouns. ... more Children tend to select novel objects over familiar ones as the likely referents of novel nouns. This finding is of central importance to several accounts of early word learning. In the current studies, 2-year-olds were shown pairs of videotaped actions, one familiar and one novel, and were asked to select the referents of novel verbs. For actions that did not involve objects, children tended to select the novel action over the familiar one in each of four experiments. For example, they chose the woman who was turning in circles while leaning backwards as "the one who is glarving" more often than the woman who was running. For actions involving objects, novel actions (e.g., shuffling balls) were chosen more often than familiar ones (e.g., kicking balls) in only two of the four experiments. An object-name-blocking mechanism was proposed to account for this last result. The preference for novel actions was also found to be strengthened by preexposing both actions from a test pair, but to be unaffected by preexposing just the novel actions.
Journal of Cognition and Development, 2012
Journal of Child Language, 1995
The most deliberate part of first-language teaching is the business of telling a child what each ... more The most deliberate part of first-language teaching is the business of telling a child what each thing is called. We ordinarily speak of the name of a thing as if there were just one, but in fact, of course, every referent has many names. The dime in my pocket is not only a dime. It is also money, a metal object, a thing, and, moving to subordinates, it is a 1952 dime, in fact a particular 1952 dime with a unique pattern of scratches, discolorations, and smooth places. When such an object is named for a very young child how is it called? It may be named money or dime but probably not metal object, thing, 1952 dime, or particular 1952 dime. The dog out on the lawn is not only a dog but is also a boxer, a quadruped, an animate being; it is the landlord's dog, named Prince. How will it be identified for a child? Sometimes it will be called a dog, sometimes Prince, less often a boxer, and almost never a quadruped, or animate being. Listening to many adults name things for many children, I find that their choices are quite uniform and that I can anticipate them from my own inclinations. How are these choices determined and what are their consequences for the cognitive development of the child?
Child Development, 1995
A new word-learning phenomenon is demonstrated and a new word-learning principle is proposed to a... more A new word-learning phenomenon is demonstrated and a new word-learning principle is proposed to account for it. In Study 1, 60 3-year-olds were shown a pair of objects and heard a novel label used repeatedly for one, but not for the other. In a forced-choice test of generalization of the label, the latter object was selected less often by the children than one that had not been present during training. This so-called Nominal Passover Effect was the same whether the speaker had completely ignored the comparison object during training or had referred to it with pronouns. The performance of a no-word control group (N = 24) indicated that the effect was not due to a preference for the less exposed of the two choice objects. The effect is consistent with the Exhaustive Reference Principle, which stipulates that whenever a new generic word is used to name something, expect it to be extended to all entities in a situation that the speaker perceives and believes to be exemplars of the name. In Study 2 (N = 48), the Nominal Passover Effect was replicated with 3 new sets of objects and with training language that contained only indefinite forms of reference. The passover experience was often sufficient to counteract children's tendency to generalize a novel label on the basis of perceptual similarity. The passover effect was not evident in free-choice name generalization tests in either study.
Child Development, 1987
Preschool children, young adults, and old adults viewed a series of familiar scenes and were aske... more Preschool children, young adults, and old adults viewed a series of familiar scenes and were asked to remember 1 item from each. The incidental memory of both children and old adults was less accurate than that of young adults. The result for children contrasts with the typical result of selective memorization research. Memory for high-expectancy items exceeded that for low-expectancy items by a greater margin when items were incidental, suggesting that even preschool children activate scene schemas during encoding. Only the young adults, however, showed the predicted tendency to recognize low-expectancy items better than high-expectancy items when items were intentional. These results may be reconcilable if some, but not all, schema-mediated encoding effects on memory depend on strategic encoding.
Child Development, 1985
Long-term memory retrieval efficiency was investigated as a potential underlying source of indivi... more Long-term memory retrieval efficiency was investigated as a potential underlying source of individual and developmental differences in cognitive functioning. Fourth-grade, eighth-grade, and college-aged subjects participated in a task using the Posner letter-matching paradigm. Letter pairs were presented simultaneously under physical-match and name-match instruction conditions. Reaction times were used to estimate parameters of long-term memory retrieval efficiency, basic encoding, decision, and response time, and name and physical output interference. Psychometric tests of verbal and spatial ability were included to assess convergent and discriminant validity of hypothesized relationships between aptitude test performance and basic cognitive processes. Developmental differences were observed in most but not all of the processing variables. Individual difference analyses indicated that less confounded estimates of processing parameters were not systematically related to verbal ability at any age level. Basic encoding and response speed was the most consistent correlate of spatial ability. The results suggest difficulties in previous interpretations of NIPI-verbal ability relationships. The study of cognitive processes in interaction and embedded in meaningful tasks is discussed.
International Journal of Behavioral Development, 1988
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Papers by William Merriman