A dual criterion account of the development of linguistic judgment in early childhood

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.