Real world word learning: Exploring the development of children’s lexical representations

Abstract

The ability to acquire new words draws on cognitive, linguistic and social competencies. Assessments of lexical acquisition are often limited to studies using multiple choice comprehension measures in contrived experimental contexts. To address these limitations the current study assessed the ways in which children developed their semantic representations of animal and artefact terms. Children differed in their knowledge of the target terms and experienced different linguistic exposures over a four week period. One hundred and thirty preschool children (mean age = 5;6) were randomly assigned to five conditions (one control and four experimental conditions). For the control and the phonological group, the knowledge children acquired about the target words was assessed at two points, baseline and at a three week follow up. For the remaining experimental groups their understanding of the terms was assessed at five points in time (baseline, 1st week, 2nd week and 3rd week post test). A range of assessment tasks were used to assess lexical knowledge: confrontational naming, multiple choice comprehension measures, sorting, short questions, identification of relations, (association task) definitions and a story generation task. Children’s word knowledge from the different conditions/groups was compared across tasks and time. The analysis focused on the depth and breadth of knowledge that the children acquired for the target words. Independent variables included previous knowledge of the target words, lexical knowledge of other words from the same semantic domain, semantic domain of the target words and type of lexical exposure. There were subtle and complex effects of the different exposure contexts for word learning. Children’s performance was significantly better for items that were partially represented than for the unknown words. Children’s existing vocabulary knowledge for animals was positively correlated with the acquisition of the target words describing animals. However, this was not the case for artefacts. The assessments of word knowledge revealed different aspects of depth in lexical knowledge.

Keywords

• Lexical representation
• Prior lexical knowledge
• Linguistic context
• Word learning