The repository contains my poster from SRCLD 2018.
Mahr, T., & Edwards, J. R. (2018, June). Development of familiar word recognition in preschoolers. Poster session presented at the annual Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders, Madison, WI.
This poster highlights some of my dissertation findings.
The poster folder contains the Powerpoint source of the poster as well
as pdf and png versions of it.
The submission folder contains the abstract and 600-word summary that
I submitted to the conference.
Development of familiar word recognition in preschoolers
Recent work suggests word recognition efficiency—how well children map incoming speech to words—may help identify early differences in children’s language trajectories. We administered a word recognition experiment during each year of a 3-year longitudinal study with 160 preschoolers. Ages were 2.5–3 years in year 1 and 4.5–5 years in year 3. In the experiment, four images of familiar nouns were presented onscreen followed by a prompt to view one of the images (e.g., find the bell!). Images included the target word (e.g., bell), a semantically related word (drum), a phonologically similar word (bee), and an unrelated word (swing). Early differences in word recognition were longitudinally stable so that children who were faster and more accurate at age 3 were relatively fast and accurate at age 5. Moreover, word recognition efficiency at age 3 was a much stronger predictor of age-5 vocabulary size than concurrent (age-5) word recognition efficiency. These results confirm that word recognition behavior provides an important early predictor of vocabulary growth. Research supported by R01 DC002932, R01 DC012513, T32 DC05359, and U54 HD090256.