YOUNG CHILDRENS AGE-OF-ACQUISITION ESTIMATES FOR SPOKEN WORDS

This study was concerned with the impact of stimulus familiarity on yo ung children's ability to recognize spoken words and make explicit jud gments about them. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds made age-of-acquisitio n (AOA) estimates for a set of words that were very similar to estimat es made by older children and adults. In Experiment 2, young children' s picture recognition, mispronunciation detection, and vocabulary moni toring performance all varied systematically with these AOA estimates and with a stimulus-type (intact-mispronounced) manipulation. Subjecti ve AOA estimates (whether from children or from adults) proved to be a better predictor of performance than did two objective familiarity me asures and subjective imageability. These results point to considerabl e metalexical knowledge on the part of young children or explicit sens itivity regarding their own vocabulary knowledge. In addition, the res ults lend some support to the notion that actual AOA contributes to su bjective AOA estimates.