Very few studies exist on the role of cross-language similarities in cognate word acquisition. Here we sought to explore, for the first time, the interplay of orthography (O) and phonology (P) during the early stages of cognate word acquisition, looking at children and adults with the same level of foreign language proficiency and by using two…

One avenue for developing second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge is through Extensive Reading (ER). ER can provide opportunities for incidental learning to occur. Class time is often too restricted for sufficient attention to deliberate learning (Hunt & Beglar, 2005) meaning ER is important for L2 vocabulary development. This article builds…

Lexical inferencing is referred to as guessing the meaning of an unknown word using available linguistic and other clues. It is a primary lexical processing strategy to tackle unknown words while reading. This study aims to explore the clue use of Chinese EFL learners in inferring the meaning of unknown word in reading. Two types of introspective…

As research progresses in the direction of studying more complex materials such as sentences and paragraphs, it becomes increasingly useful to have a pool of associative norms. The stimulus words for the free association norms presented here were chosen because 100 of them were not used before, they are primary associates of words for which norms…

The role of imagery formation as a mnemonic device in drawing valid inferences from a prose passage was studied. The 72 undergraduate subjects were divided into two groups: one given instructions to form images for the objects discussed in the text, the other given instructions to repeat each sentence five times. Half the passages consisted of…

Relationships existing between elements of intelligence, age, and environment and meaningfulness of materials were examined along with the hypothesis that an increase in meaningfulness of materials would cause the mean difference in learning scores for different intelligence levels to first increase, then decrease. In a paired-associate task,…