The present study was designed to examine the developmental change in the structure of semantic memory by using multidimensional scaling. Preschool children (4-yr.-old and 5-yr.-old) performed 56 sorting tasks with 56 possible combinations of 3 words from 8 familiar words. A three-dimensional solution of the data showed (1) dimension I may be interpreted as a taxonomic category and the combination of Dimensions II and III as a complementary relationship. (2) Also, younger children put more weight on Dimensions II and III than older children, whereas older children put more weight on Dimension I.
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