Effects of lexical factors on lexical access among typical language-learning children and children with word-finding difficulties

This investigation studied the influence of lexical factors, known to impact lexical access in adults, on the word retrieval of children. Participants included 320 typical and atypical (word-finding difficulties) language-learning children, ranging in age from 7 to 12 years. Lexical factors examined included word frequency, age-of-acquisition, neighborhood density, neighborhood frequency, and stress pattern. Findings indicated that these factors did influence lexical access in children. Words which were high in frequency and neighborhood frequency, low in neighborhood density and age-of-acquisition, and which contained the typical stress pattern for the language were easier to name. Further, the number of neighbors that were more frequent than the target word also had an effect on the word's ease of retrieval. Significant interactions indicated that age-of-acquisition effects decreased with maturation for typically-learning children whereas these effects continued to impact the lexical access of children with word-finding difficulties across the ages studied, suggesting that these children's difficulties in accessing words may have prevented them from developing strong access paths to these words. These findings support a view of lexical access in which access paths to words become strengthened with successful use.