Although some of the children in the present study did not manifest this skill during nonsense word interpretation, this lack of metacognition did not interfere with their nonsense word interpretation.
In each session, a short word and a nonsense word reading practice at the appropriate syllable level was given, and then the nonsense word reading task was administered.
When performing a nonword repetition task, participants are required to repeat a multisyllabic nonsense word back to the experimenter immediately after the nonword has been presented.
However, despite this effect, the majority of children in all four age groups did accept a nonsense word as a new label for a familiar referent.
The items in the real word and nonsense word lists of the derived word production task were pseudorandomized, such that no two words derived with the same suffix occurred consecutively.
Adults showed a similar pattern of accuracy across the suffixes on the nonsense word productions, suggesting that they too can use suffix information when no lexical representation is available.
A response was scored as correct if it was a real or nonsense word that differed from the stimulus only with respect to the onset portion of the word.
The findings from the present experiments concerning both pseudohomonym and nonsense word interpretations contribute toward our understanding of lexical acquisition.
