NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

Chapter 4:

RATIONALE FOR THE EXPERIMENT 1

4.1 Introduction

This chapter starts with an overview of the methodological limitations of the studies
reviewed in the previous chapter and introduces aims, rationale and research questions of
Experiment 1. Then, the aims, methods and results of the pilot study are presented. The
chapter concludes with the main findings and implications drawn from the pilot study which
will lead to the elaboration of the rationale of Experiment 1.

4.2 Methodological limitations of the previous studies

The studies reviewed in the previous sections demonstrated how context can be used for
word learning and particularly that story book reading can be a significant source of
vocabulary acquisition. Furthermore, it was shown that word learning is related to the number
of exposures, as well as children’s entering vocabulary (Elley, 1989; Jenkins et al. 1984;
Leung and Pikulski, 1990; Nagy et. al 1984; 1987) and phonological memory (Michas and
Elenry 1994). Nevertheless, to date the published work contains methodological limitations
and a more systematic investigation is needed.

87

<<   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   >>

More intriguing information