Analogy condition. Group IV received four stories where the non-words were presented
through a Lexical Contrast condition. The same conditions were applied to the 5.6 year olds
(Table 4.1).
|
Table 4.1 |
Number of children by age and group | |||
|
_______________________________Linguistic conditions______________________________ | ||||
|
Inference |
_______Definition |
Analogy |
Lexical contrast | |
|
4;6 yr olds |
7 |
6 |
6 |
6 |
|
5;6 yr olds |
10__________ |
8____________ |
10 |
_________6____________ |
|
Total______ |
17___________ |
14_________ |
16 |
_________12___________ |
The target words
The unknown lexical items were saxophone (three syllables), tricycle (three syllables),
teepee (two syllables), sandals (two syllables). The stories introduced the four unknown
lexical items that were kept the same across all the conditions. Word frequency books (Caroil
et. al. 1971; Burroughs, 1957) were used in order to define the unknown words for that
particular age range. The above indexes were chosen because (a) they were appropriate for
the age range that was the focus of the Experiment; secondly they included words that exist
in children’s spoken vocabulary which reflects the vocabulary that they have already
acquired and; thirdly all the research tradition in that area had used them before (Eller, et. al.
1988; Elley, 1989).
The target words met the following criteria: (∖)Word∕Conceptual difficulty, only concrete
words were used; (2fWord length: bisyllabic and polysyllabic words were used; (3)
Grammatical case: nouns were used only. These nouns were replaced by non-words in
order to ensure that whatever learning takes place, it will be due to the exposure to the stories.
Following Anderson and Freebody (1983) the non-words were made up by changing one
or two letters in real words. In the present Experiment, three of the letters of the real word
were replaced with three new letters. The non-words that came up were: "tangophori' for
saxophone, "tramacle" for tricycle "feber" for teepee and “sockets” for sandals.
The stories
The stories were constructed according to the following criteria, which were kept the same
across all the linguistic conditions: (1) The non-word appeared in the passage and in the
illustrations two times in each story; (2) The length of each story was about 7-9 sentences;
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