A lexical advantage in four-year-old children's word repetition.

The children had reported normal speech and hearing development, so the study does not show how this pattern appears in children with speech or language disorders. Real words and nonwords were tested on separate days, and every child did the real word task first. This order was not counterbalanced. Pictures could help children retrieve real words, but the pictures did not help retrieve nonwords. Only the first consonant-vowel sequence was scored, so the study does not report accuracy for the whole word. Mothers with lower education levels were underrepresented, so maternal education was not tested across a broad range. Transcribers were not blind to the study purpose, although they scored separate sounds rather than whole words. The study did not test whether this pattern predicts a clinical diagnosis or whether therapy changes it.

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Do not treat a real-word advantage as a sign of a speech disorder. This study tested children with reported normal speech and hearing development, and nonword accuracy was high for children with larger receptive vocabularies.