NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

words were presented in a sentence like context, and no developmental differences were
investigated. In the present experiment, the novel words were presented in a more naturalistic
situation, such as a story reading context. Additionally, developmental differences were
investigated. It was expected that children with high phonological working memory will
perform better than children with low phonological working memory in the word learning
tasks. Developmental differences were also expected.

Existing vocabulary knowledge

There is evidence that children’s existing vocabulary affects the amount of novel words that
children will Ieam from a story (Gathercole et al. 1997; Robbins & Ehri, 1994).
Nevertheless, the previous studies measured existing vocabulary with different standardised
tests (BPVS and PPVT-R) without including different age groups. The present experiment
will measure existing vocabulary using the BPVS test (which is appropriate for the target age
range) and different age groups.

Nature of the input

Inference context

The context of inference was investigated earlier on by Wemer and Kaplan (1952). They
looked at 9- to 13- year-old children’s abilities to infer the meaning of real, but unfamiliar,
words in sentence contexts. The children were presented six different sentences that provided
different contexts for each word and were then asked to interpret each sentence in the light
of the preceding sentences. Werner and Kaplan found developmental differences in the
children’s abilities to infer meaning from context and noted that correctness of response
increased significantly with increasing age. Extending that kind of research, a simplified form
of this task with unfamiliar, concrete words is used in Experiment 1 to investigate the use of
inference context to interpret word meaning by younger children (4-to-6 year olds).

Definition context

According to Anderson and Nagy (1991) definitions can make a contribution to the process
of word learning. Learning the definition of a word may serve as a foundation for making
more effective use of subsequent encounters with that word in context, or help in organising
and synthesizing information gained from prior encounters. However, the previous findings

90

<<   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   >>

More intriguing information