The above explanation is in accordance with the Sternberg and Powell’s (1984) theory of
word learning from context according to which the children can benefit from contextual cues
and mediated variables in order to infer the meanings of the novel words. For example, the
children from the Definition group, during the second week of the intervention, were exposed
into a context which included various contextual cues, such as stative descriptive cues (cues
regarding physical properties), functional descriptive cues (cues regarding possible purposes
of x, actions x can perform, or potential uses of x), class membership cues (cues regarding
one or more classes to which x belong). Additionally, the Lexical contrast group children,
during the second week of the intervention, were exposed into a context which included some
contextual cues, such as spatial cues (cues regarding the general or specific location that the
x can be found). On the other hand, the Ostensive definition, Phonological control and
Control groups were not exposed to any contextual cues which justifies their worse
performance.
B. Children performed better over time- Children ,s representations change over time
Children’s performance varied across sessions. Particularly, it was found that children
performed better over time on the naming, definition, short questions and story generation
tasks. No significant differences over time were found in children’s performance on the
multiple choice task, provision of justifications in the association task and provision of
contrasts in the contrast task.
Differential input had an impact on children’s performance to almost all the tasks. This
appears to result from the fact that they used the information they were exposed to either
because the information were more salient or it was easier for them to encode, or they were
less distracted. On the other hand, no significant differences over time were found in
children’s performance on the other tasks (e.g. multiple choice task, for which the same
pattern was found as in Experiment 1-ceiling effect from the first measurement), probably
because children could succeed on them easily using very few information without any need
for more information from various linguistic contexts.
Furthermore, the qualitative analysis of some tasks (definition, association, story generation)
demonstrated changes over time regarding the properties the children focus on. For example,
it was found that in general, children provided more descriptive, functional, semantic