It isn’t chartreuse because it’s___”. If children answered with a colour term, one may
infer that they interpreted the new word to refer to colour. They found that most of the
children were able to provide proper contrasts for the new words they learned.
Another attribute task is one used by Richard and Hanner (1985) in which the student is
asked to tell all that is known about a word and the experimenter prompts the student to
use varied attributes (function, size, colour, category, etc.). Although little developmental
data are available on the number and the type of attributes that should be expected, this
type of task can be useful in observing how words and attributes are organised by the
student and particularly which attributes are limited or entirely omitted.
In semantic senseless tasks, the student must know each individual lexical item and each
semantic feature, and must use world knowledge to recognize the probable
interrelationships of the words in this context. Finally, the student must be able to express
what is wrong with the sentence and why it is senseless.
Definition tasks
Curtis (1987) used a definition task to measure word learning. She found that, children
first give the use of the item, a description of it, or providing its use in context. Later,
children use synonyms or explanations. She suggests that although definition tasks can be
a positive addition to single-word vocabulary testing, they also have limitations,
particularly when the student is only given credit for complete and conventional
definitions.
Rusell and Saadeh (1962) investigated developmental differences in understanding words
in terms of three levels: concrete, functional, and abstract. The researchers designed a test
that offered a concrete, a functional, and an abstract meaning alternative for each word,
as well as an incorrect distractor. For example, the meanings offered for the word “count”
were, at the concrete level, “to find how many pennies are in your pocket”; at the
functional level, “to find the number of things in a group”; and at the abstract level, “to
say numbers in order-upward and downward”. The results for third-, sixth-, and ninth-
grade students showed the dominance of concrete and functional choices for third graders,
and the decline of correct choices along with increases in functional and abstract choices
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