Artificiality of the experiments
Carey (1978), Dockrell and Campbell (1986) and Nelson (1988) have noted that many
experimental word learning tasks do not represent the typical ways in which young children
interact with adults or the ways in which they typically Ieam new words. For example, how
often do children encounter 12 to 16 new words within one play session and how likely is it
that an adult, would name each item 22 times ?
Developmental trends
Most of the studies using stories, up to now have investigated word learning from context
using one age group (Elley, 1989; Jenkins et al. 1984; Leung and Pikulski, 1990). In that way
developmental differences have not been investigated.
What is in the story context ?
Most of the studies which have shown that children can Ieam new words from listening to
stories (Elley, 1989; Jenkins et al. 1984; Leung and Pikulski, 1990; Nagy et. al 1984; 1987)
have used already published stories which are appropriate for older children. In that way they
have been unable to control and manipulate what is in the story that makes it good for word
learning.
Factors such as the role of different linguistic contexts in relation to other cognitive and
individual factors have not been examined. Linguistic context refers to the morphosyntactic
and/or semantic information available in an utterance. This information can constrain the
possible meaning of an unfamiliar word occurring in that utterance (Goodman, McDonough
and Brown, 1998). Children appear to use the morphosyntactic and semantic context to infer
the meaning of an unfamiliar word prior to 2 years of age (Katz et. al. 1974; Au, 1990).
Target words
It is unclear how the previous studies defined the target words as unknown. Overall, the
choice of the target words as unknown was based on assumptions rather than explicit criteria.
Limitations of post-test measurements
Moreover, word learning was usually assessed only through multiple choice test (Eller et al,
1988; Leung and Pikulski, 1990; Elley, 1989; Robbins and Ehri, 1994; Senechal and Cornell,
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