Chapter 8:

DISCUSSION & CONCLUSIONS

8.1 Introduction

The broad conclusions that may be drawn from this research are summarised and discussed
in the present chapter. Particularly, the chapter includes a summary of the most important
findings, discussion of the important parameters for lexical acquisition and issues on
measuring word knowledge. The chapter concludes with a proposal towards a model of
lexical acquisition in context. At the end of the chapter, implications for lexical acquisition,
as well as the main limitations of the present study and suggestions for future work, are
presented.

8.2 Summary of the findings

The present thesis includes a series of two experiments, designed to explore lexical
acquisition from listening to stories. Experiment 1 was designed to investigate how a single
exposure to different linguistic input in relation to the children’s age, phonological working
memory and existing vocabulary (receptive) knowledge affects the acquisition of novel
words. Experiment 2, which was developed from Experiment 1, aimed to investigate how
repeated exposure to combinations of different linguistic contexts in relation to children’s
prior lexical knowledge (receptive and expressive), semantic domain and prior knowledge
of the target words contribute to the acquisition of novel lexical items. For the purposes of

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