was not related to the acquisition of the target words describing artifacts again across tasks
and testing.
Those findings support other experimental work. For example, Carey and Bartlett (1978)
found that the children’s partial mappings of the novel word, were highly dependent on the
child’s preexisting colour lexicon. Nevertheless, the fact that the pattern was not consistent
across domains (e.g., animals and artifacts) is in accordance with other studies. For example,
Heibeck and Markman (1987) in a study of word learning found significant correlations
between children’s prior lexical knowledge in the domain of colour and texture and
children’s ability to Ieam new words from those domains. On the other hand, no correlation
was found for children learning shape words and their prior knowledge in the domain of
shapes.
A possible interpretation for the above relation between prior lexical knowledge of a domain
and learning novel words from that domain may be that prior familiarity with words in a
particular lexical domain may influence fast mapping ability to some degree. Children in the
present experiment knew most of the animal words included in the vocabulary assessments
but knew many fewer artifact words. Children who were introduced to new animal terms
learned more about words from that domain than about the artifacts domain. It may be that
once children have established a domain, the assumptions of mutual exclusivity and contrast
may be operating more effectively to help the children to analyse the object, eliminate
hypotheses and discover what property the new label refers to. It is also possible that the
domain of artifacts may not yet be structured into a domain and therefore any linguistic
information may be less useful if the child does not consider the information given (contrasts,
definition) within the domain.
Another explanation for the differences found across domains may be that children are more
likely to correctly associate a new word with its referent if the domain is salient to the child.
If artifacts are simply not as salient for children as animals this could account for children’s
poorer performance in both the vocabulary assessment and in learning the new artifact words
presented.