NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION



Does the children ,s prior knowledge of the lexical items influence the provision Offunctional
properties?

All the children provided more “functional” properties for the partially represented words
than for the unknown words across testing. Significant differences were found for post test
1 (Wilcoxon: Z= 2.05, p<.05) and post test 3 (Wilcoxon: Z=2.6, p<.05). Separate analysis for
each one of the groups demonstrated the same pattern, however, the differences were
significant for the Lexical contrast (Wilcoxon: Z=2.03, p<.05) and for the Definition groups
(Wilcoxon: Z=2.4, p<.05) during post test 3.

Is the provision of functional properties influenced by the semantic domain of the lexical
items?

All the children provided significantly more "functional” properties for the words describing
artifacts than for the words describing animals across testing (Wilcoxon: Pl: Z=2.9, p<.005;
P2: Z=2.8, p<.005; P3: Z=2.7, p<.0005). Separate analysis for each group demonstrated the
same pattern. Significant differences were found for the Definition group during post test 1
(WilcoxomZ=I.9, p<.05), for the Lexical contrast group during post test 2 (Wilcoxon:
Z=2.02, p<.05) and post test 3 (Wilcoxon: Z=2.03, p<.05) and for the Definition group
(Wilcoxon: Z=2.4, p<.05) during post test 3.

Analysis of the “semantic properties”

Is there a differential impact of the type of exposure to new lexical items that the children
receive on the provision of semantic properties ?

During post test 2, the Definition group provided significantly more “semantic” properties
than the Ostensive definition group (Wilcoxon: Z=2.1, p<.05). The same was evident for post
test 3 (Wilcoxon: Z=1.9, p<.05).

Does children ,s provision of semantic properties increase with increased exposure to the
lexical items?

The children provided significantly more “semantic” properties during post test 3 than during
post test 1 (WilcoxomZ=3.2, p<.005) and post test 2 (WilcoxomZ=2.3, p>.05). The analysis
was repeated separately for each group. The same pattern (better in post test 3 than post test

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