Overall, the use of the linguistic context to infer the meanings of unknown words has also
been documented by other studies (Carey and Bartlett, 1978; Dockrell and Campbell, 1986;
Gottfried and Tonks; 1996). Both, Carey and Bartlett (1978) and Dockrell and Campbell
(1986) demonstrated that children used the semantic linguistic contrast to infer the meaning
of novel colour terms. Furthermore, Gottfried and Tonks (1996) found that children can use
an inclusion statement to infer the meaning of a colour word. However, none of the previous
studies has contrasted different factors for word learning using multiple measurements.
8.3.3.2 Different linguistic contexts contribute to the acquisition of different
aspects of word meaning
Once the children extract individual words from speech, they have to Ieam their meanings.
In order to acquire the meaning of a word the children must Ieam the accurate phonological
representation of the lexical items, the syntactic properties of the word, the semantic
representation as well as how the word is used to communicate one’s intended message.
Both experiments demonstrated that different linguistic contexts contribute to the acquisition
of different aspects of word meaning.
8.3.3.2.1 Production
During Experiment 1 children in the Inference condition tended to perform better on
producing the word than children in the other conditions during the immediate post test. On
the other hand, during the delayed post test, children in the Lexical contrast condition
performed better on producing the words than the children in the other conditions. A similar
finding was demonstrated in Experiment 2, where the children in the Lexical contrast group
performed better on producing the words than the children in the other groups.
The last finding indicates that children’s exposure to a lexical contrast context about the
novel words contributes to the acquisition of the phonological properties of the new words.
The Lexical contrast task is characterised by what has been called by Clark “clearness of
referent”. Therefore, a possible interpretation of the above finding may be that in contexts
where the referent for the new word is obvious (such as lexical contrast context) children are
easily able to connect the referent and the new word and therefore respond successfully to
production tasks. This interpretation is also supported by empirical research (Dockrell and
Campbell, 1986; Heibeck and Markman, 1987). Dockrell and Campbell (1986) found that