The above discussion indicates that different linguistic contexts contribute to the acquisition
of different aspects of word meaning. That finding can have important educational
implications that will be discussed in subsequent sections. Diagram 8.1 demonstrates
graphically how the different linguistic contexts contributed to the different aspects of word
learning. With a first look, it can be seen that the children from the Analogy condition
performed better on the Analogy task than all the other groups. Also, the Inference condition
contributed to children’s good performance in the production, inference and sentence
generation task during the Experiment 1. The contrast condition as well contributed to
children’s good performance in the production, contrast and world knowledge questions.
Last, by far, the Definition group Outstriped all the other groups across tasks, therefore it
seems to be the best predictor for word learning.

However, this does not necessarily mean that this is the best predictor for word learning, for
example, all the types of word across all the age groups. In the present study, quite simple
words were used. Maybe more difficulties would have arisen with more complex words, that
their meaning could change from context to context.

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