prerequisites which were already developed in the older age groups. Thus, those children
could benefit more from the various types of information.
Furthermore, there were some tasks (inference, contrast, multiple choice) that the older
children performed better than the younger ones but the differences were not significant. The
above finding can be explained in two ways, (a) In the case of the multiple choice task the
performance of all the age groups reached a ceiling level, implying that either the task was
not sensitive enough to tap age group differences or that all the age groups met the
requirements of the certain task, (b) In the case of the inference and particularly of the
contrast task, it is probable that even the older children had not yet developed the abilities
required to succeed on those tasks, therefore age differences were found to be non-significant.
However, in some cases the older children seemed to benefit by the type of the input they
were exposed to, such as the case of the older children from the contrast condition who
performed better on the contrast task than their younger counter parts. It may be the case that
the older children had their semantic domain network more fully developed than the younger
ones, therefore they could benefit more by the contrast type of linguistic input.
B. Phonological memory played an important role in the lexical acquisition process
Children with high phonological memory performed better across tasks and across testing
than children with low phonological memory. The same pattern was found within each
linguistic condition. However significant differences were found in some of the conditions.
For example in the Lexical contrast condition it was found that the children with high
phonological memory performed significantly better than the children with low phonological
memory across almost all the tasks. A possible explanation for the above finding is that the
children who received information about the target words in a Lexical contrast context,
needed also high phonological memory abilities in order to process the given information and
successfully answer most of the tasks. Another possible explanation is that the Lexical
contrast input made them more sensitive to the phonological differences of the items.
Overall, the effects of the phonological memory for word learning are consistent and extend
previous findings by Gathercole and Baddeley (1989, 1990) who have found that vocabulary
scores were highly correlated with phonological memory scores at ages four and five. In
addition, the present findings demonstrated that in general, phonological memory does not