7.5 Overall Conclusions and Discussion of Experiment 2
Experiment 2 was designed to extend our understanding of the lexical acquisition process
from listening to stories by overcoming the limitations of Experiment 1 as well as by
introducing new factors under investigation. In that way, the lexical acquisition process was
explored in more depth and as it occurs in naturalistic situations.
Specifically, Experiment 2 investigated the role of child based factors (prior lexical
knowledge of two semantic domains and prior knowledge of the target lexical items) in
relation to the nature of the lexicon (semantic domain of the target words) and the nature of
the input (children’s repeated exposure to various linguistic contexts). The results revealed
that children can benefit from repeated exposure to various linguistic contexts which provide
them with explicit information about the word’s meaning. It was also found that children’s
word learning varies by their prior lexical knowledge, the prior knowledge of the lexical
items as well as the semantic domain of the target words and the type of measurement. The
main findings OfExperiment 2 are discussed into detail in the following paragraphs.
A. Children can benefit from repeated exposure to various linguistic contexts
Experiment 2 demonstrated that children can benefit from repeated exposure to various
linguistic contexts which provide explicit information about the word’s meaning.
Particularly, it was found that the Definition group performed significantly better across tasks
than the other groups. The Lexical contrast group was the second type of group that
performed quite well. On the other hand, poorest performance was observed in the Ostensive
definition, Phonological control and Control groups. This can be explained by the fact that
prior to the final test, these three groups had no information about the denotation of the new
terms and virtually no information about the sense of the new term’s word meaning.
A possible explanation for the Definition group’s best performance is that children of that age
(5.00-6.00 year olds) can benefit from exposure to explicit information about the novel
words. Also, the Lexical contrast group performed better than the other groups except from
the Definition group because children from that group were exposed to more additional
information about the target word’s meaning than the other three groups (Control,
Phonological control and Ostensive definition group).