The Indirect Measures

7.4.2.2.4 Association task

Scoring criteria for the association task

Children’s knowledge was assessed for each of the four lexical items. The present task
included two subquestions. (1) Did the children associate the target items with any others?
(2) Did they provide an appropriate justification¹ ? Each subquestion was scored separately.
Responses were scored as correct and incorrect. Completing the association task was scored
as correct, while failure to make the associations was scored as incorrect. Last, provision of
appropriate justification was scored as correct, while provision of Inappropriatejustification
was scored as incorrect. In any of the above subquestions, each child could score from 0-4.
Qualitative analysis of the justifications was also carried out.

Analysis

Most of the children were able to answer the association questions across testing (to
associate the pictures of the target items with others). During post test 1 and 2 the
associations reached 97%, while during post test 3 the associations reached 98%. The
majority of children who provided associations, also Providedjustifications for their choices
(Pl=89.4%; P2=77%; P3:= 86.3%). Figure 7.17 shows that the Definition group provided
more justifications than the other groups across testing. The Control group provided fewer
justifications than the other groups. In the next sections, the analysis of the association task
will be focused on the justifications provided, since from these, inferences can be made
about their understanding of the words’ meaning.

¹The operational definition of an appropriate justification for the present experiment was if the justification
was based on semantic, perceptual or thematic criteria. That decision was based on three major theories
of word meaning. Semanticjustifications were included according to the Probabilistic view theories that
classification at different levels characterizes a word’s meaning. Perceptualjustifications were included
according to theSemantic features hypothesis that a set of features characterizes word meaning. Thematic
justifications were included according to the Functional core theory, the relations an object has with other
entities is part of a word’s meaning.

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