5.4 Results of Experiment 1

The results are divided into four sections. The first section considers the baseline measures
(British picture vocabulary scale and test of non-word repetition).The second section
considers the Production measures (Naming task). The third section considers the
Comprehension measures (Inference, task, Analogy task, Contrast task, Sentence generation
task, Multiple choice and Definition task).The fourth section explores general trends and
consider comparisons between and across measures. All of the research questions were
explored for each post-test measure. The structure of the presentation of the results is as
follows:

1. To what extent does children’s word learning differ by their age ?

2. To what extent does children’s word learning differ by the linguistic condition in which
the novel word is presented ?

3. To what extent do children retain the words’ meaning over time ?

4. To what extent does word learning differ by the children’s existing vocabulary ?

5. To what extent does word learning differ by the children’s phonological working
memory ?

Relevant statistics will be presented for each one of the questions. In general, non-parametric
statistics were applied except in cases where the variances among groups were equal
(according to Levene test) then Parametric statistics were used. Where non-parametric
statistics were used, these were the Wilcoxon test, the Kruskal-Wallis I-Way ANOVA and
Friedman test. Because non-parametric tests are less sensitive to significant differences, I
report as significant anything which is <.05 and as trend anything between >.05 and <.07. All
the other differences are described as non-significant.

Where parametric tests were used, these were the parametric I-Way-ANOVA (Bonferroni
test was used for the post hoc analysis, which has a significance level of .05), Т-test for
paired samples and for independent samples. Then, where appropriate, an Error analysis was
carried out.

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