Learning to make definitions

Abstract

The ability to define words by means of other words, which forms a part of many standardized tests, must be learned by a child. The nature of the ‘definitional task’ and the development of language responses (from children 4; 5 to 7; 5) are discussed in terms of a linguistic analysis of the definitional form and its semantic relations. Progress in definitional strategies by children moves along two continua: conceptually from the individually experiential to the socially shared; and syntactically from actual predicates through hypothetical predicates to adult definitional sentence frames. Implications include novel elicitation techniques, psycholinguistically informed evaluation of direction and scoring measures of some common standardized verbal tests, and better understanding of the range of normal development on one specific language task.