prior lexical knowledge across tasks. Additionally, the children with high receptive prior
lexical knowledge performed also better across tasks than the children with low receptive
lexical knowledge. However the above pattern was characterised by a trend for significance
for most of the tasks except for the definition task, categorisation questions and story
generation task.
The above findings implies that children’s expressive prior lexical knowledge is more crucial
for acquiring the full meaning of a word than their receptive prior lexical knowledge. It is
probable that expressive prior lexical knowledge is more important for word learning than
the receptive one because the first may reflect more advanced levels of word knowledge (see
triangles at section 7.4.3.6) which can foster novel word learning more than the receptive one
which probably reflects less advanced levels of word knowledge.
F. Children ,s word learning varies by the type of measurement
Children’s performance was found to vary across the post test measurements and across
testing. It was found that the children performed better on the multiple choice than the other
tasks. Then they performed significantly better on the association task than the rest of the
tasks. Success in the naming, definition, contrast and “world knowledge questions” tasks
follows. Lastly, the worst performance was observed on the story generation and
“categorisation questions”. The above findings were evident across testing.
The different measurements used in Experiment 2 tapped on various aspects of word meaning
such as the reference, sense and denotation. Similarly as in Experiment 1, the results of
Experiment 2 demonstrated that although the children showed that they had acquired some
sense of the word’s meaning (success in the multiple choise task), their understanding of the
denotation (success in the naming, definition, “world knowledge questions” tasks) of the
target words was at lower levels. In general, the across tasks analysis demonstrated that
children’s acquisition of the three different aspects of the words’ meaning varied by the type
of measurement.