Knowledge Judgments and Object Memory Processes in Early Childhood: Support for the Dual Criterion Account of Object Nameability Judgment

According to the dual criterion account of early linguistic judgment (Merriman & Lipko, 2008 Merriman , W. E. , & Lipko , A. R. (2008). A dual criterion account of the development of linguistic judgment in early childhood. Journal of Memory & Language , 58, 1012–1031. [Google Scholar]), preschool-aged children who possess more efficient object memory processes should also be more accurate judges of whether various objects have known names. In support of this claim, both the accuracy of object recognition and the speed of object naming were found to be correlated with the accuracy of object nameability judgments, but not with the accuracy of four other mentalistic judgments. Nameability judgments tended to be as accurate as judgments of word familiarity and judgments of the relation between seeing and knowing. These three judgments tended to be more accurate than false-belief judgments.