questions). The association task was designed to explore the way that children associate the
target items with other items, as well as to investigate the justifications provided. Thus, the
association task will tap on similarity and therefore sense of the word’s meaning. Each of the
items (target and choice items) was represented pictorially. The selection of the choice items
met certain criteria. Half of them were living things - animals and plants - and the other half
were non-living things - natural kinds and artifacts - (see diagram in Appendix 6.1). The
sentence generation task investigated children’s ability to use the new term in an appropriate
sentence context. How they referred to the target word and the types of properties and
relations provided in the story were also explored. Thus, the sentence generation task was
designed to tap not only at the denotation but also sense of the word’s meaning.
The short questions task included two sets of questions which were designed to investigate
children’s understanding of the words’ meaning. The first set of questions (Categorisation
questions') examined children’s understanding of possible superordinate relations,-tapped on
the sense of the word- for example “Is the ostrich a kind of bird ?”. The second set of
questions (World knowledge questions) examined children’s world knowledge, where the
ObjectsZanimals are commonly found. For example “can we find the ladle in the kitchen?”
(For full sets of questions see Appendix 7.5). For each target word nine questions were
designed (A set of five, comprised the categorisation questions, while a set of four comprised
the world knowledge questions). Each set of questions included one question as a destractor.
One correct answer was only available per target word for each one of the sets.
The main research questions OfExperiment 2 are the following:
1. Is there a differential impact of the type of exposure to new lexical items that the children
receive ?
2. Does children’s performance improve with increased exposure to the lexical items ?
3. Does the nature of the children’s prior knowledge of the lexical items from the same
semantic domain influence acquisition?
4. Is the acquisition process influenced by the semantic domain of the lexical items ?
5. To what extent, does the child’s prior lexical knowledge influence acquisition?