(Wilcoxon: Z=3.5, p<.0005). They also provided significantly more definitions in post test
3 than in post test 1 (Wilcoxon: Z=3.5, p<.0005).

Does the children's prior knowledge of the lexical items influence the provision of
definitions?

By considering all the children together there were 260 responses for the partially represented
and 260 responses for the unknown. Figure 7.8 shows that all the children tended to provide
more definitions for the partially represented than the unknown words, however the
differences were not significant. Separate analysis for each one of the groups demonstrated
the same pattern. Significant differences were found for the Phonological control group
(Wilcoxon: Z=2.1, p<.05).

Figure 7.8 Total number of correct responses on the definition task by children’s prior
knowledge of the lexical items across testing

Qj Partially represented words

Is the provision of definitions influenced by the semantic domain of the lexical items?

Figure 7.9 below shows that all the children provided more definitions for the target words
describing artifacts than for the animals. The differences were found to be significant for
post test 1 (Wilcoxon: Z=2.8, p<.005) and post test 3 (Wilcoxon: Z=2.06, p<.05). The same
pattern was found for each group. The differences were found to be significant for the
Ostensive definition group during post test 1 (Wilcoxon: Z=2.6, p<.05) and Lexical contrast
group across testing (Pl: Z= 1.9, p<.05; P2: Z=2.03, p<.05; P3: Z=2.1, p<.05).

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