The Role of the Nonlinguistic Knowledge of Preschoolers in Their Mental Categorization of Antonyms in Croatian Language

The Role of the Nonlinguistic Knowledge of Preschoolers in Their Mental Categorization of Antonyms in Croatian Language

Vignjevic , Jelena
Kovacevic, Maja

Language education of preschool children in Croatian kindergartens often involves lexical-semantic tasks. In the analyzing of the knowledge of paradigmatic lexical relations in preschool children, their knowledge about the world is an essential factor. This work, pulls away from the traditional theoretical approach based only on linguistic knowledge, and the acquisition of antonyms in preschool language development reflects on the foundations of cognitive-functional theory of language. In the absence of metalinguistic and metalexical knowledge, children's derivation of antonyms depends on nonlinguistic experience, on the knowledge about the world. The tasks in the generation of antonyms conducted among children in Zagreb kindergartens show that differences in success in the production of antonyms are attributable to the children's cognitive characteristics, to the familiarity of the words involved, to the familiarity on the tasks, and to nonlinguistic experience of children. Conclusions presented in this paper illuminates acquisition of metalexical and lexical knowledge of the Croatian language in preschool children.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

882