NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

than children with smaller vocabularies. The absence of a delayed post-test means that it
is unknown whether this learning persisted over time.

All these studies involved one or more repeated readings of the story concerned.
However, Senechal and Cornell (1993) investigated whether children could learn new
vocabulary from a single reading of a storybook. They also considered the effects of four
reading conditions: I) adult reads book verbatim with child encouraged to listen passively,
ii) adult repeats target words to emphasize them, iii) adult reads target word and recasts
it as a synonym, and iv) adult asks child questions about the target word. Four and five
year old children were pretested for target word knowledge, then read a storybook
(containing the target words) on a single occasion, in one of the four conditions presented
above. Post-tests of receptive language were administered immediately after reading, and
again one week later. Children knew few words of the pretest and showed a significant
increase on the immediate post-test, with a slightly higher increase on the delayed post-
test. Verbatim reading was as effective as the other reading conditions.

In another study Senechal (1997) investigated the differential effect of storybook reading
on preschoolers acquisition of expressive and receptive vocabulary. Three- and four-year-
old children were read one storybook individually. The study included three storybook
reading conditions: single reading, repeated reading, and questioning. Each storybook was
read three times. Listening to multiple readings facilitated children’s acquisition of
expressive and receptive vocabulary, whereas answering questions during the multiple
readings was more helpful to the acquisition of expressive than receptive vocabulary.

Furthermore, Senechal has proposed a model about how a child extracts word meanings
from context. According to the model, the child must:(a) encode and maintain a
phonological representation of the novel word; (b) extract clues from the semantic,
syntactic and pictorial contexts to constrain memory search for potential meanings in the
case of learning synonyms for known referents and to facilitate the inferential process in
the case of novel referents; © select or construe a potentially appropriate meaning; (d)
associate the inferred meaning with the phonological representation of the novel word; and
(e) integrate and store the new knowledge with the existing knowledge base (Senechai,
Thomas & Monker, 1995).

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