Abstract

This study examined the taxonomic assumption in word learning 3- to 5-year-old korean hearing and hearing impaired children who have not yet learned the sign language. Each subject was assigned to the novel word condition or the no word condition. Each child was presented with a target picture and two choices, one of which belonged to the same category as the target and the other were thematically related to the target. In the novel word condition, the labels of the target pictures were taught orally to the normal hearing children. In contrast, to the hearing impaired children, labels were taught visually with the stickers on which the labels were written. The result of this experiment revealed that novel labels prompted both the hearing and hearing impaired children to attend to the categorical relation, even in the presence of thematic picture. This result suggests that the taxonomic assumption is a cognitive constraint in word learning which operates in children who have normal oral language experiences and who have abnormal language experiences.