It was also found that the children provided more functional properties for the partially
represented than the unknown words during the story generation task. A possible explanation
for that pattern could be related to the Functional core theory (Nelson, 1974). According to
this theory children’s development of a new concept begins with the first experience of a
new object. That provides a set of relations which an object has with other entities. Once a
list of functions has been identified, the other objects which possess the same characteristics
are categorised as belonging to the same concept.

From the above, it can be concluded that when children have already established a partial
representation of a word’s meaning, that representation mainly concerns thematic and
functional properties. A possible explanation could be that children acquire the words’
meanings in context and not in isolation. Therefore, they relate them with the other items
found together in the same context.

8.3.2 Nature of the lexicon

For the purposes of the present study, the nature of the lexicon was defined as the semantic
domain to which the target words belong. The semantic domain was found to play a
significant role in lexical acquisition. The role of the nature of the lexicon for lexical
acquisition is discussed in the following subsection.

8.3.2.1 The word learning process differs by the semantic domain of the target
words

Experiment 2 demonstrated that children’s performance on the word learning tasks varied as
a function of the semantic domain that the target words belong to. Particularly, the
Qualitative analysis of the Association, Definition and Story generation task indicated that
children’s focus on a variety of properties differ by the semantic domain of the target words.
Thus, when children acquire words describing animals they mainly focus on
perceptual∕descriptive, functional and contextual properties, while they focus on semantic
properties when they acquire target words describing artifacts.

The above finding could probably imply that the domains of animals and artifacts are
different semantic domains with the artifacts domain having sharp clear-cut boundaries-since
the children focus on their semantic properties-while the animal domain has less clear cut
boundaries -since they focus on perceptual∕descriptive and contextual properties-for the

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