8.4 Issues in measuring word knowledge

Measurement of word learning with various tasks was also a main focus of the present study.
In the following subsections, issues on measuring word knowledge, the discrepancies
between comprehension and production, the phenomenon of overextension as well as the
extent to which children’s word knowledge change over time are discussed.

8.4.1 Children’s word learning performance varies by the type of measurement

Both experiments demonstrated that children’s performance varied by the way of measuring
lexical knowledge. Experiment 1 demonstrated that during the immediate post test children
performed better on the multiple choice and inference tasks than the other tasks. Children
also performed better on the naming, definition and sentence generation tasks than the
analogy and contrast tasks. The same pattern was found during the delayed post test.

Experiment 2 demonstrated that the multiple choice task was the one that children mostly
succeed at, in comparison to the other tasks across testing. Then, they also performed better
on the association than the other tasks across testing, as well as better on the definition than
the other tasks across testing. Success on the world knowledge questions and naming task
followed. Furthermore, children were least successful on the contrast, categorisation
questions and story generation tasks across testing.

Possible explanations could be offered for children’s low performance on the contrast,
definition and story generation tasks. It is probable that the nature of the tasks themselves
was hard, because they address explicit knowledge as in the case of the definition task. They
may also tap on their wider understanding of the term. An example of such a task is the
analogy and contrast task, which required the children to relate the target word with items
from the same semantic category. They may also have needed more time in order to establish
a semantic representation of the new term and its relation to other items from the same
semantic category. Generating also a story using the new word is a quite demanding task
requiring the children to demonstrate understanding of the words’s meaning by providing
appropriate relations with other items and to produce the novel word. This may tap on
children’s intelligence as well, however this was not measured by the present study.

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