the above tasks a week later. Or may be the information were not encoded in depth because
the children did not have enough exposures and they needed more experience.
On the other hand, children’s performance on the sentence generation task improved over
time. That could probably mean that the children one week later had better organised and
accommodated the incoming information from the previous weeks and performed better a
week later. It was probably a matter of time.
F. Children ,s performance varied across tasks
The different measurements used in Experiment 1 tapped in different aspects of word
meaning such as the reference, sense and denotation. The results OfExperiment 1 indicate
that the acquisition of a word’s meaning cannot be described by a single task, since a single
task cannot reveal in full the different aspects of a word’s meaning. For example, children’s
performance on various tasks (definition, analogy, lexical contrast) indicated their level of
understanding of the sense of the word’s meaning task which varied across tasks as well as
their understanding of the denotation of the word’s meaning (multiple choice). Thus, it was
found that children performed at a ceiling level on identifying a target item-among four items
in the multiple choice task. On the other hand, they performed at a lower level on providing
definitions for the target words (including information about their semantic domain) -
definition task-and at a much lower level on providing an analogous and a different item
(from the same semantic domain as the target word) -in the analogy and lexical contrast task-.
Thus, children’s acquisition of the target word’s sense (the relationship of an item with other
items from the same semantic domain) which looks at conceptual structure varied by the type
of measurement. In general, the across tasks analysis demonstrated that children’s
acquisition of the three different aspects of the words’ meaning varied by the type of
measurement.