The acquisition of homonymy

The growth in children's ability to perform the task of separating the sounds of words from their meanings was investigated by asking children between 3;3 and 6;3 to select homonyms from pictures. The results show a growth in ability with age, with a jump at 4;4. An investigation of the developmental changes in the strategies employed shows that the task is cognitively complex. Performance in the younger children is more hampered by a resource-limited inability to cope with many cognitive factors all at once than by lack of ability to do the linguistic aspects of the task. These cognitive factors include access to vocabulary, rehearsal of intermediate results, and implementation of a search strategy.