NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

and children’s pre-existing knowledge of the words rather than phonological memory
alone contributed to that learning.

Furthermore, Gathercole, Service, Hitch and Martin (1997) attempted to provide a more
systematic and detailed investigation of the relationship between phonological short-term
memory and new word learning, with four experimental word learning tasks that vary
systematically the amount of new phonological information to be learned by 5- year-old
children. Measures of the children’s performances on two measures of phonological
memory (digit span and non-word repetition), vocabulary knowledge, and nonverbal
ability were also obtained. They found that the phonological working memory plays a
significant role in the long-term learning of the sounds of new words. The effects of the
existing vocabulary knowledge will be discussed in more detail in the following section.

3.4 The effect of existing vocabulary knowledge in word learning

An interesting question is whether the child’s existing vocabulary prior to testing will
influence the gain in listening to stories. Gathercole et. al. (1997) administered among
others the BPVS, in order to investigate the effects of children’s existing vocabulary for
novel word learning. They found that children’s existing lexical knowledge plays a
significant role in the long-term learning of the sounds of new words. Nevertheless, in this
study, the novel words were not presented in a story but in a sentence context.

Robbins and Ehri (1994) administered a standardised vocabulary test ( PPVT-R). Scores
on this test were found to be the only subject-related variable to affect the amount of
words Ieamt from the story. Particularly, children with larger vocabularies Ieamt more
new words than those with smaller vocabularies.

This effect of vocabulary size on word learning found in Robbin and Ehri ^,s study is what
Stanovich (1986) called a “Matthew effect”, where the rich get richer while the poor get
poorer. He explained it as a reciprocal relationship; development of vocabulary facilitates
reading comprehension, and reading comprehension feeds into vocabulary growth. The
current knowledge base is of great importance in acquiring new information. A rich
elaborated knowledge of words will assist the inference of meanings of unfamiliar words,

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