children used the Lexical contrast to recognize and comprehend novel words for animals.
Furthermore, Heibeck and Markman, (1987) found that 2-3-and 4- year old children used the
linguistic context to succeed in a Naming task.

8.3.3.2.2 Understanding of the words ’ meaning

In Experiment 1 children in the Inference condition performed better on the sentence
generation task, than children in the other conditions for both post tests. The inference
context provided children with information about the target words implicitly by constructing
the meaning of the novel word in relation to others. It can be argued that the children used
these information to build links with other items. Therefore, the provision of constructed
information about the novel words’ meaning may have contributed to their better
performance on the sentence generation task. Schank (1975) has argued that the making of
inferences is crucial in deriving meaning, serving to fill in missing slots, in order to move to
a higher level organisation.

Furthermore, children in the Inference condition performed better on the inference task than
children in the other conditions. Similarly, children in the Analogy condition performed
better on the analogy task than children in the other conditions, while children in the Lexical
contrast condition performed better on the contrast task than children in the other conditions
for both post tests. Last, children in the Definition condition tended to provide more
definitions than children in the other conditions during the immediate post test. The children
used the context to infer the meaning of the novel words (see discussion in the previous
section).

During Experiment 2, also the children in the Definition group performed better across tasks
than the other groups across testing. A possible interpretation for the above finding is that
the introduction of the novel words to explicit linguistic contexts such as the Definition
condition, contributes more to word learning in general, than the introduction of the novel
words to implicit linguistic contexts such as the Ostensive definition group. That
interpretation is also supported by Gottfried and Tonks (1996) in their investigation of novel
colour terms. They found that explicit information regarding the relation between novel and
known colours is necessary for the acquisition of the novel terms.

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