Chapter 6:
THE LINK:
RATIONALE FOR EXPERIMENT 2
6.1 What has been found so far?
Experiment 1 investigated the role of different linguistic contexts in relation to child based
factors (age, phonological memory, vocabulary learning) in the acquisition of two novel
words during a single exposure. The acquisition of the new words was measured using seven
different tasks. The main findings of Experiment 1 are summarised in the following
paragraphs.
The older children were found to perform better than the younger ones for both post tests. It
was also demonstrated that there were different strategies or knowledge based factors which
were employed by the older age group children (Nelson, 1988; 1990). Thus, there was an
interrelationship between the linguistic input and the type of lexical tasks word knowledge
was assessed.