Cultural and Linguistic Fairness in the Assessment of Semantics

In creating a semantic assessment that will be linguistically and culturally fair, it is important to avoid the bias of acquired vocabulary tests. This article describes techniques to assess children's processing of new words, their lexical organization and retrieval, which may be more significant than the number of words known. Special properties of the quantifier every also give an idea of the child's level of semantic ability. In addition, we examine how the child's performance on each item-type helps the speech-language pathologist determine the sources of children's problems in this domain.

KEYWORDS

Lexical organization - fast mapping (novel verbs) - transitive structures - transfer structures - complement structures - acquired vocabulary - quantifiers - argument structure - learning from context

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