NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

allowing effective use of context cues. These cues boost incidental learning, thus
expanding the child’s knowledge base.

Discussion of all the current experimental evidence about vocabulary acquisition raises
an important issue, that of assessing vocabulary knowledge. The next section is about the
assessment of vocabulary knowledge, by focusing firstly on the limitations of the current
measurements and then to the introduction of alternative methods.

3.5 Assessment of vocabulary knowledge

A critical and at the same time practical question is how word knowledge can be assessed,
or what kind of measures allow judgement that a word is known. One persistent difficulty
in assessing vocabulary knowledge is the differing criteria used to determine that a word
is acquired or known. As noted by Drum and Konopak (1987), “access to word
knowledge cannot be compared to an on∕off toggle switch” (p.79). The learner’s success
in comprehension or production tasks may be depend on the type of information available
to the learner and the type of response required. In the following subsections the multiple-
choice test and other measurements are discussed. This is followed by a discussion of
alternatives to the traditional measures.

3.5.1 Limitations of multiple-choice test measurement

The most widely used measure of word knowledge for vocabulary research is the
multiple-choice format, in which the child selects a picture for a target word from among
several choices (usually four). The assessment of an individual’s word knowledge
resulting from a multiple-choice test provides us with only a partial understanding of
children’s knowledge of the target word.

Moreover, the child’s word knowledge as measured from a multiple choice test may be
greatly influenced by the nature of the distractors. Maybe they present confusions that
interfere with what the child knows about a word. On the other hand, if there is a great
semantic distance between distractors and the target word, a correct response can be
obtained from knowing merely the general domain of the word. Furthermore, multiple
choice tests require only a low level of knowledge, and they can make vocabulary
knowledge appear “flat”, as if all words are either known to the same level or unknown.

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