Phonological memory was also found to play an important role for word learning.
Particularly, it was revealed that the children with high phonological memory performed
better across tasks than the children with low phonological memory. The existing vocabulary
also tended to play a role for novel word learning. However, the results remain inconclusive,
since the differences were not significant. Thus the importance of the existing vocabulary
knowledge for word learning needs to be further investigated (see following section).
Experiment 1 also demonstrated that children’s performance on the word learning tasks
differed by the linguistic condition they were assigned to. In other words, the context where
a child encounters a word has a significant impact on the types of inferences he can make.
The above findings illustrates that a constraints model is not sufficient to explain the
development of full lexical representations. The findings are more in accordance with
Nelson’s (1988; 1990) claim, that children learn new words by interacting with adults
linguistically and поп-linguistically at different contexts.
It was also found that children’s word knowledge was significantly worse during the delayed
than the immediate post test. The above finding indicates that the children could not
remember the information given the previous week probably, because they had not encoded
the information in much depth since they had only a single exposure to a linguistic input.
They had not the opportunity to construct a full representation. Of course there was the case
for certain tasks, such as the sentence generation task, where the children performed better
one week later (delayed post test), probably because they needed more time to process the
incoming information and build an accurate representation of the word’s meaning. The above
finding raises issues for further research (see following section).
In general, the findings of Experiment 1 are consistent with Adams’s and Bullock’s (1986)
view that there are two necessary conditions (cognitive processes and guidance direct or
indirect) for the establishment of a working lexicon. The findings are also in accordance with
Nelson’s (1988; 1990) interactive functional model for word learning. According to them,
the child in order to acquire word forms and match them to the contexts of word uses of the
adult, is guided toward the conventional uses by the adult both directly and indirectly. But
the child must also rely on his or her own cognitive processes to construct meanings from the
language in use.