Adopting the above proposal, it can be argued that the type of a word’s meaning
representation the child already has fully or partially developed, will play a role for the later
full development of the word’s meaning. For example, a child may know the denotation but
not the sense of a word’s meaning or vice verca. Therefore, Experiment 2 was also designed
to investigate to what extent children’s prior knowledge (see design section in chapter 7) of
the lexical items plays a role for later learning of the same items using various tasks.
The semantic domain of the lexical items was also another new variable included under
investigation for Experiment 2. Research has shown that words which belong to different
semantic domains result in developmentally distinct patterns of acquisition. This is the case
for the natural kind and colour terms. Many studies (Bornstein, 1985; Davidoff, 1991) have
found that children acquire the meanings of natural kind terms before they acquire the
meanings of colour terms.
Explanations of this difference at the beginning focused on the added salience that object
terms have over property names and the extra attention which children devote to object
naming. However, Braisby and Dockrell (1999) found that young children are sensitive to
the semantic distinction between natural kind and colour terms and that the difference can
only be explained on semantic grounds. For example, natural kind and colour terms differ
semantically, with natural kind terms having sharper, clearer boundaries and colour terms
having unclear or variable boundaries. By corollary, artifacts appear to have sharper cleared
boundaries than natural kind terms. Animals and artifacts are two ontological categories
which have been used by many studies (see for example Keil, 1989) to explain their strong
boundaries as due to their different nature. Experiment 2 will investigate whether there is any
difference in the acquisition process of members of these two different categories which
arise as a result of the semantic distinction between animals and artifacts. Furthermore, the
choice of animals and artifacts was based on the fact that these are domains which children
are quite familiar with, either from school or from every day life.
Lastly, since Experiment 1 demonstrated that children’s word learning performance varied
as a function of the lexical tasks, new tasks will be also included in Experiment 2 in order to
extend our understanding of word learning. These tasks are the association task, the story
generation task and the short questions task (categorisation questions and world knowledge