3. Does the nature of the children’s prior knowledge of the lexical items influence
acquisition?

5. Is the acquisition process influenced by the semantic domain of the lexical items ?

6. To what extent, does the child’s prior lexical knowledge influence acquisition?

7.3 Methods

7.3.1 Participants

Two hundred and fifty children from five primary schools in London were screened for
Experiment 2. All the children had to have English as their first language. At the end, one
hundred and thirty five-year-old English-speaking children (age range 4 years 10 months to
6 years) were selected to take part in Experiment 2¹ . Sixty five were boys and 65 were girls.
Table 7.1 shows the range of age and the mean age (in years and months) of the sample by
group of intervention.

Table 7.1 Characteristics of the sample

7.3.2 Design

The Design of Experiment 2 is presented in Table 7.2. Experiment 2 had a mixed within-
subjects between-subjects design. The different groups and the prior lexical knowledge
(receptive and expressive) were the between-subjects variables, while the semantic domain
of the target items, prior knowledge of the target lexical items and time (post tests 1,2,3),
were the Within-Subjects variables.

¹ The rest, 120 children, did not take part in the study because they did not meet the
criteria to be included (see design section).

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