Gender differences in the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift in seven year old children.

In the history of psychology free word association has been studied in both adults and children for its implications regarding cognitive and language development. Since Sir Francis Galton in 1883 (McNeill, 1966) invented the word association test, it has been examined through the 20th century to the last decade. Free word association has been said to exemplify ideas, unconscious thought, structure of meaning, and the linguistic structure of grammar. A specific area of research for the past 15 years that is related to the general problem of word association has been the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift.In order to understand the shift it is necessary to have knowledge of the different theories and meanings attributed to word association. It is also important to know the definition of the shift. There are four theoretical interpretations to the meaning of word association in relation to learning. The first meaning comes from the ancient laws of associative learning, and it emphasizes principles of frequency, commonality, associative strength, and the process of recall. A more contemporary view is that word association reflects linguistic structure. The third view assumes word association reflects the structure of the "subjective" lexicon. Finally, there is the view that word association reflects logical operations and conceptual structures, and the relationship to linguistics and language structure is indirect.The syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift refers to the responses made to stimulus words in a free association task. In this task the subject is given a stimulus word and is asked to say the first word that comes to mind. The responses are either from the same grammatical class as the stimulus word or the responses are from a class that is outside the grammatical class of the stimulus word. Words that are from the same grammatical class have been referred to as paradigmatic, homogeneous, or superordinate responses. Words that are outside the grammatical class have been referred to as syntagmatic, heterogeneous, or subordinate responses. The syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift refers to the fact that adults tend to give predominantly paradigmatic responses and young children tend to give syntagmatic responses. This shift to paradigmatic responses seems to occur in children sometime between the ages of five and nine. It also coincides with other cognitive and linguistic changes such as the shift from pre-operational thought to logical concrete operations established by Piaget's research (Nelson, 1977). Therefore, the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift plays an important role in the study of the development of semantic language structure and cognition in children.Past research in language development (McCarthy, 1954) has determined there is generally a gender difference in the acquisition of semantic and syntactic language structure in children. That is, females tend to acquire language before males. Research has also determined that the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift exists (Brown and Berko, 1960). Therefore, to completely understand language development in children, it appears necessary to determine if & gender difference exists in children's acquisition of paradigmatic responses.Thesis (M.A.