8.3.1.4 Prior knowledge of the lexical items is related to novel word learning
When children meet novel words these may be totally unknown or partially represented in
their mental lexicon. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children performed better if the words
were partially represented than unknown in those tasks that were deemed more difficult for
the children to perform such as the naming, definition, and short questions task. In contrast,
children’s performance on the multiple choice, association, contrast and story generation
tasks was not found to be related with children’s prior knowledge of the lexical items. It
seems likely then, following the triangles, presented at the end OfExperiment 2, that these
initial partial representations provide the children with a sufficient knowledge to further
elaborate the representation and move up the triangle.
Also, children’s success on the above tasks could also be related with the three aspects of the
word’s meaning-reference, sense, denotation- (Lyons, 1977). Thus, the findings demonstrate
that if the children have already acquired the denotation or part of the denotation of the
word’s meaning (success in the multiple choice task for the partially represented words) they
can then easier extend the acquisition of the word’s denotation (success in the naming task)
and acquire the sense of the word’s meaning (success in the definition and categorisation
questions tasks).
The effect of prior knowledge of the lexical items have also been identified by previous
studies. Thus, Carey and Bartlett (1978) found that children’s partial mappings of the novel
word amongst other factors were highly dependent on the name the children used for the
target words during pre-tests. Furthermore, Gelman et al., (1998) found that children were
much more likely to overextend in comprehension when they did not know the name of the
item than when they did.
Furthermore, the Qualitative analysis of the association task demonstrated that the children
provided more thematic justifications for the partially represented than the unknown words.
A possible interpretation could be related to script theory (Schank & Abelson 1977; Nelson,
1985). According to the theory, young children’s knowledge is more likely to be represented
in terms of relations, routines and dynamic structures.