Inferring the meaning of words and then verifying one's interpretations is widely believed to create relatively strong memories of the items. According to the available research, it is when the inferences are accurate that the learning outcomes are the most promising. The present study extends this inquiry to idioms. Fifty-six ESL learners were…

Three experiments investigated adult learners' acquisition of a novel adjective. In English and other languages, meanings of some gradable adjectives are said to include an absolute standard of comparison (e.g., "full" means completely filled with content). However, actual usage is often imprecise, where a maximum absolute standard of…

A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old…

Examines how native and second-language English speakers interpret reflexive anaphores and pronominals in certain sentence types. Interpreting anaphores was more difficult overall and a consistent order of difficulty was found for five different sentence types. Results are discussed in the context of the Parameterized Binding Theory and the Subset…

This study investigates advanced Japanese language learners' abilities to infer unknown "kanji" (Chinese character )words while reading authentic Japanese texts. Data obtained from 42 English L1 students indicate that, first, although they can guess the meanings of unknown "kanji" words in context, they frequently make erroneous guesses or fail to…