5.5 Overall Conclusions and Discussion of Experiment 1

Experiment 1 was designed to extend our understanding of stories as a word learning context
by addressing the effects of various linguistic contexts, different cognitive factors
(phonological memory, existing vocabulary knowledge) as well as children’s age in the
acquisition of new words during a single exposure. The results illustrated that no single factor
can account for the word learning process although all factors assessed contributed to the
child’s success. Lastly, the assessment of word learning with multiple measurements
substantiated the multifaceted nature of the word learning task. The main findings of
Experiment 1 are discussed in the following paragraphs.

A. The older children performed better than the younger ones across tasks and across testing
Experiment 1 demonstrated that there is a general effect of age, which can also be seen in
some linguistic conditions in relation to certain lexical tasks. Age related differences have
been also documented by Crais, (1987). However, these differences involved older age
groups (first, third, fifth grade children and adults).

Nelson (1988) claims that distinct problems are encountered within each age period,
therefore, differing processes of acquisition should be expected at each developmental level.
Nelson attributed two factors that contributed to the differing processes of acquisition. A
strategy factor”- different strategies are employed by different age groups; or a “knowledge
based factor”- general knowledge and experience with the world increases with age, and may
influence children’s ability to perform better. Experiment 1 extends our understanding of
these factors by demonstrating that these factors interrelate with the linguistic input the
children are exposed to and the type of the lexical tasks word knowledge is assessed.

In particular, it was found that the older children from almost all the types of input (linguistic
conditions) performed significantly better than the younger on the majority of tasks.
Specifically, they performed better on those tasks which required them to produce accurately
the names of the target words, to generate a sentence with the new words, to provide a
definition and an analogy for the target words. Previous research has also demonstrated that
the older the children they are, the better definitions they can give and the better analogies
they can make (Anglin, 1977; Goswami, 1991). A possible explanation for the above findings
is that those tasks (naming, sentence generation, definition) required different cognitive

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