Abstract Summary
Little is understood how children, and particularly L2 children, learn multiple meanings for words. In this paper we first report the validation study of a new test aimed at measuring children’s knowledge of polysemy and then describe an intervention developed to support children’s learning of polysemous words through text.
Abstract :
Vocabulary is widely acknowledged to be an important predictor of children’s language and literacy performance (e.g. Cain et al, 2004; Nation & Snowling, 2004). Both researchers and teachers express concerns about language learner’s vocabulary (Bialystok et al., 2010; Nancarrow, 2018). However, in both research and practice, a relatively narrow view has often been taken of vocabulary as the understanding of single meanings of words. In fact, between 30-80% of words in English, and similar proportions in other languages, have multiple meanings or senses: they are polysemes. Knowing multiple meanings of the same word may be an important predictor of skills such as reading comprehension (Logan & Kieffer, 2017). However, little is currently known about how children learn to associate the same word with multiple meanings, and how they apply this knowledge in language comprehension. In the present research programme, two studies were conducted to examine children’s learning of polysemes. The first study explored how children with English as a first or second language performed on a newly developed receptive measure of children’s knowledge of polysemes. The results showed that children with English as a second language were less likely to know both meanings of a polyseme than children with English as a first language, and that this difference was not entirely explained by differences in general vocabulary. They also demonstrated that knowledge of polysemous words remained a unique predictor of reading comprehension, after controlling for age, non-verbal reasoning and general vocabulary. In the second study, which will be completed by the start of the conference, we assessed the impact of an intervention which aimed to improve children’s knowledge of polysemes and their ability to infer a polyseme’s meaning from context. Findings from the intervention will be discussed in relation to how children acquire knowledge of multiple word meanings.
