more easily and efficiently the incoming new information. This interpretation is also
supported by Mervis (1987) and Neisser (1987) who found that children as they get older,
increase their ability to process purely verbal input. Furthermore, Vallian and Eisenberg
(1996) argued that all the children in their study had a limited performance system that
became progressively less limited as development proceeds.

Another possible explanation could be that different comprehension strategies are employed
at different age ranges which have not yet matured for the youngest group. It is also probable
that the younger children have less experience of listening to stories and therefore attended
to the overall plot rather than to new words. It may be also, that the younger age group
children were less interested in or motivated to infer the meanings of the new words. Thus,
Experiment 1 extended our understanding of these factors by demonstrating that they
interrelate with the linguistic input the children are exposed to and the type of the lexical
tasks word knowledge is assessed.

8.3.1.2 Phonological working memory is involved in word learning: It predicts
production but not comprehension of the novel words

As Gathercole et.al. (1997) claims, learning one’s native language clearly involves acquiring
not only the semantic properties of the new word but the phonological properties as well.
Experiment 1 supported the above claim by demonstrating that the phonological memory is
an important parameter for lexical acquisition. Particularly, it was found that the children
with high phonological memory performed better than the children with low phonological
memory in almost all the tasks.

There is a growing body of other evidence indicating the involvement of phonological
memory in children’s vocabulary acquisition as was measured mainly by a naming task.
Gathercole and Baddeley (1990) found that the low repetition children were slower at
learning phonologically unfamiliar names such as " Pimas" for the toys than the high
repetition children. Moreover, Michas and Henry (1994) found that phonological memory
was a significant predictor of the ability to learn explicitly taught new words. However, it
did not predict word learning for the incidentally introduced words. Furthermore, Gathercole,
Service, Hitch and Martin (1997) found that the phonological memory play a significant role
in the long-term learning of the sounds of new words.

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