(linguistic conditions) age, phonological memory and existing vocabulary knowledge, while
the within subjects variable was the time (immediate and delayed post test).

Table 5.2 Design of Experiment 1

Abbreviations: Im.Ass = Immediate assesment; De.Ass = Delayed assessment; Lex. Contrast= Lexical contrast

Target and Control words

In order to be included in the study the children had to fail the multiple choice pre-test both
for the target (oboe and teepee) and the control words (beret and hatchet).The reason for that
was to identify the children who already knew the target words and exclude them from the
Experiment. The multiple choice pre-test had four trials, two trials for the target words (oboe
and tepee) and two trials for the control words (beret and hatchet) (Appendix 5.1). Since
children can succeed on multiple choice tasks for a variety of reasons (including guessing)
to provide evidence of learning, it was necessary to compare children’s performance with
items where no input was received (control words).

The choice of the target lexical items had to meet certain criteria. First, the target words were
of low word frequency according to different indexes (Burroughs, 1957; Caroil, Davies, &
Richman, 1971). Those indexes were appropriate for the age range the experiment focused
on, and included words that exist in children’s spoken vocabulary, which reflects the
vocabulary they have already acquired. Children’s targets word knowledge was also
pretested through a multiple choice test. The children who succeeded in the multiple choice
pre-test were excluded from the Experiment 1. Another criterion was that the target words

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