What do children's errors tell us about the strategies used during a word inferencing task?

A vital and often overlooked aspect of word learning is the ability to establish deep semantic knowledge by adjusting and fine-tuning new word meanings as information becomes available. Here we studied differences in children's ability to update incorrect or incomplete word meanings by studying error types in a word inferencing task. The participants, 45 8- and 9-year-olds, read three sentences that all ended with the same nonsense word and were asked to identify the meaning of the last word.