The interventions took place over a period of three weeks. Immediate assessment took place
after each intervention. The Control groups were assessed at the pre-test and post-test 3,
while the Experimental groups were assessed on two additional occasions (post-test 1 & 2).

Children’s word knowledge was assessed through seven tasks. Assessment took place over
three sessions for the experimental groups. The order of presentation of the tasks was the
same for all the children across sessions, so that any order effects would be balanced across
children. The measurements used are presented in Table 7.4. The naming task was
administered before the multiple choice task, in order to prevent any cues for the target words
to be provided.

Table 7.4 Post-test measurements of Experiment 2

7.3.3 Materials

The materials used in the present experiment included the target lexical items, the baseline
vocabulary knowledge tests and the post-test measurements. The materials for each
measurement are described separately in the following subsections.

The target lexical items

The items were chosen to represent two different semantic domains. Two were animals
(ostrich and mole) and the other two were artifacts (ladle and stool). In each domain one item
was a high frequency word (mole for animals and stool for artifacts) and the other one was
a low frequency word (ostrich for animals and ladle for artifacts). The items were chosen to

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