Acauisition of lexical semantic fields: an evaluation of the PRISM-L procedure

Abstract

While developmental approaches to language treatment are prevalent in the domains of grammar and phonology, they are rare and poorly organized in the area of vocabulary. This is due both to a lack of data on lexical acquisition and to the difficulty of developing a practical clinical procedure for assessing and remediating lexical deficits. One of the few available procedures, Crystal's (1982) PRISM-L, has been largely neglected. In this study, we evaluated PRISM-L's developmental arrangement of lexemes by coding spontaneous speech data obtained in the Mount Gravatt Project (Hart, Walker, and Gray, 1977) from Australian children 2;6 to 6;6 years of age. Results showed regular developmental changes for all groups, with the exception of some anomalies among children 4;6 years old. Comparison of the number of lexeme types to the sequence predicted by PRISM-L produced a statistically significant but low correlation (r = 0.229). By reorganizing the PRISM-L chart to retain a linguistically coherent structure but better match the obtained data, a substantially better correlation (r = 0.763) was achieved. This revised chart is recommended for future clinical use.