De Organisatie Van de Woordenschat Bij Kinderen Met Een Cognitieve Deficientie

With adults, many words in the memory are ordered on the basis of semantic relations. Especially co-ordinative relations between words (dog-cat) are strongly represented. In a child's lexicon, this arrangement is not clearly present yet.Studies into the development of lexical organization of normally developed children by means of word association tasks, have shown that co-ordinative relations are already present in a child's lexicon at an early stage (Eibers et al., 1993). However, these can only be addressed directly in a certain context (Contrast Association). The co-ordinations are not available independently yet (Free Association). This suggests that co-ordinative relations of adults have a contrastive origin.In these studies the development of lexical organization of children with a cognitive deficiency has been looked at. The group to be examined consists of 42 pupils. It has been examined whether their lexical organization deviates from normally developed children. A comparison with adults has been made as well. These studies consist of two kinds of word association: Free Association and Contrast Association.The most important findings point out that children with a cognitive deficiency do not deviate from normally developed children as far as their reactions in Free Association are concerned. Both groups of children mention the same small number of co-ordinations. With respect to the Contrast Association, however, the children with a cognitive deficiency mention considerably less co-ordinations than normally developed children. With the children with a cognitive deficiency, this results in a smaller number of co-ordinations in the Contrast Association, but apparently not in a smaller number of co-ordinations in the Free Association.