DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE POLYSEMOUS MEANINGS OF THE MENTAL-STATE VERB KNOW

This study investigated children's understanding (3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-y ear-olds) of the different levels of meaning of the cognitive verb kno w as defined by the Hall, Scholnick, and Hughes (1987) abstractness an d conceptual difficulty hierarchy. We found that cognitive verb knowle dge increased with development and that certain low levels of meaning were mastered before certain high levels of meaning irrespective of th e medium of presentation: video-taped ''skits'' and audio-taped ''stor ies.'' However, children developed an understanding of low levels of m eaning at a more rapid rate than high levels of meaning. This resulted in a more differentiated and hierarchical cognitive-verb knowledge in older children. Finally, we found that the audio-taped stories were m ore difficult than the video-taped skits, and that both tasks were sig nificantly correlated with a standardized vocabulary measure for all a ges except the 3-year-olds. The implications of this study and others for a model of the cognitive-verb lexicon are discussed.