Inference of Word Meaning from Syntax Structure by Normal Children and Retarded Adolescents

Children from five to 12 years of age (N # 136 boys and girls) and institutionalized retarded adolescents (N # 30 boys and girls) were given a task developed by Brown to test ability to infer nonsense word meanings from syntactic clues. Response accuracy for the normal children was consistently low from five years up to eight years of age, after which it increased steeply with increasing age. However, accuracy levels were markedly below those reported by Brown and raise questions concerning his original finding that young children are largely successful in using the grammatical context of new words to guess their meaning. Performance of the retarded adolescents did not parallel that of the nonretarded children, and on two of the three parts of speech their performance fell below mental age expectations, a result attributed to their deficient generalization ability.