stories can be one of the many ways that children can learn new words from. The results
could be extended by including other types of contextual cues and different modes of
presentations, such as listening to versus reading a story, or watching a video.
Fourthly, this study was carried out in the English language, and it is unknown whether the
results could be generalised in other languages. A possibility for extension would be to
replicate the study in different languages with different structures. Fifth, this study did not
address social factors. It would be interesting to investigate to what extent social factors such
as the socioeconomic status (SES) of the family, the educational background of the parents,
children’s exposure to books relate to word learning. Bornstein et. al. (1998) for example
have examined the role that the sociodemographic characteristics play in children’s (aged
1;8) vocabulary competence. Lastly, the replication of the present study to different
populations such as children with language difficulties, or blind children would shed light on
to what extent the present findings are applicable both to normal and children with language
difficulties.
8.8 Concluding remarks
The present study demonstrated that children’s lexical acquisition process from context
varies very much by the nature of the linguistic input to which the children are exposed, the
nature of the lexicon such as the semantic domain of the target words, children’s prior lexical
knowledge of the target words and existing vocabulary, as well as their age and the task that
is used to measure word learning. The study has both theoretical, educational and
methodological implications. The importance of how we measure word learning and the
conclusions we draw was also demonstrated.