come from children who are able to read. Therefore, the contribution of the definition in a
story context by different age groups (4 to 6 year olds) is investigated in Experiment 1.
Analogy context
Gentner and Holyoak (1997) claim that analogy is also a powerful cognitive mechanism that
people use to make inferences and Ieam new abstractions. They claim that analogy is the
process of understanding a novel situation in terms of one that is already familiar. The
familiar situation provides a kind of model for making inferences about the unfamiliar
situation. Much of cognition and learning depends on identifying the relevant knowledge
which the learner already has in existing memory, so that this knowledge can be used as a
starting point for learning what is new (Meadows, 1993).
Researchers from a number of theoretical backgrounds have studied children’s analogical
reasoning. Levinson and Carpenter (1974) demonstrated that young children can solve what
they called quasi-analogies such as “a bird uses air, a fish uses ?” The developmental
literature centres on understanding or recognising an analogical relation set up by the tester.
As Meadows (1993) claims, to elucidate the development of this wider range of analogical
reasoning, it may be necessary to explore the area of language development and investigate
the ways in which adults present analogies to help children structure new information.
Therefore, based on the previous considerations Experiment 1 will investigate the role of
analogy for word learning.
Lexical contrast context
The choice of the lexical contrast linguistic context is based on the “Lexical contrast
constraint”. According to that, as words are acquired, they will be differentiated or contrasted
with existing words, and children will assume that different words have different meanings
(Clark 1987). Several studies have shown that children acquire word meanings in that way -
however in artificial experimental situations (Carey & Bartlett, 1978; Heibeck & Markman,
1987; Au, 1990; Gottfried & Tonks, 1996). In the present experiment novel words will be
contrasted with other already known words in a more naturalistic situation, a story context.
The research questions OfExperiment 1 were the following:
1. To what extent does children’s word learning differ by age ?
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