NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

Age was found to have an effect on children’s performance, since the 5.6 year old children
performed better than 4.6 year olds across all the different linguistic conditions (Table 4.2).

Table 4.2 Children’s performance (percentages) across tasks by age in the

immediate post test

Abbreviations: L.contrast = Lexical contrast; M. Choice=Multiple choice; Tram=Tramacle

Differences between Wsyllabic and polysyllabic words were found for the younger age group
in the production task in both post tests. Bisyllabic words were found to be easier for the 4.6
year olds than the polysyllabic words. Moreover, the specific linguistic structure of the
stories had an effect on children’s performance. Both age groups tended to answer specific
questions only if they had received the relevant input. However, the linguistic conditions
were not very clear-cut, something which limited the previous finding and had implications
for the Experiment 1.

4.3.4 Conclusions

The pilot study was designed to investigate how different linguistic contexts contribute to
word learning. It was found that different types of linguistic context can affect different
aspects of word learning. The main implication of that is to test its viability with a bigger
population.

Furthermore, for the main study the content of the stories was slightly changed in order to
have clear-cut conditions. Thus, the Inference condition provided information only about
the question ⁱⁱWhat do we do with an x ?” (Inference task), the Definition condition provided
information only about the question ⁱⁱWhat a(n) x is T (Definition task), the Analogy
condition provided information only about the question “Do you know something else like
this one ?” (Analogy task), and the Lexical contrast condition provided information only
about the question ⁱⁱDoyou know something else different from that one ? ” (Lexical contrast
task). The use also of four stories was a very big burden for the children. Thus, two stories
only were used in the Experiment 1 with interchangeable order of presentation.

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