Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the…

In this "First Person Singular" essay, the author describes her education, teaching experience, and interest in understanding the learning of language. Anyone reading this essay will not be surprised to learn that the author's questions about language learning and optimal teaching methods were only met with further questions, and no…

Vygotsky's work on the acquisition of foreign language words has been criticized for lacking a formal view of language as a system and for taking little interest in questions such as the route and rate of language acquisition. We argue that word meanings really do not constitute a formal system, either in the way they develop, or in the way they…

Article investigates the truth-value interpretation of amphigorous, contradictory, redundant, and informative sentences and their corresponding negations. (Author)

Semiotics, the study of signs, is a relatively new and highly controversial area. Symbols, icons, and indexes represent the three types of signs. Semantics, pragmatics, and syntactics represent the three basic semiotic areas, with pragmatics having a growing influence in oral language and reading. A comprehensive view of curriculum is implicit in…

Discourse analysis attempts to identify and describe the semantic relationships among units of thought larger than a word (predications). Two basic types of these relationships exist between predications, conceptual and nonconceptual. A conceptual relationship exists between two predications when they share a concept or when a concept in one…

Provides an experimental validation of Landau and Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure on how children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. The children's choice of the correct referent for a given verb versus a nonsense verb in two syntactic structures is explained. (37 references) (GLR)

Examines how children's beliefs about word meanings may affect their use of contrastive linguistic information in the input of word learning. Two separate studies are discussed that involve how three- and four-year-old children handled new word meanings after exposure to novel terms. (58 references) (GLR)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's pragmatic conception of language, his theory on language learning, and his treatment of the function of language in the growth of the child are the focus of this book. Wiggenstein's study of language is compared with those made by linguists, psychologists, and sociologists, and accounts of language learning based on empirical…

Reports on two experiments which question the assumption that semantic processing is superior to nonsemantic processing, and which demonstrate that effective semantic elaboration cannot be equated with the quantity of semantically congrous information. (Author/AM)

The Bransford and Franks paradigm for the study of semantic integration is called into question. Three experiments are described that test the hypothesis that this paradigm produces its results by creating confusion and interference. The results call for continued search for a paradigm relative to the study of integration. (AMH)

Research supported by grants to the University of Minnesota, Center for Research in Human Learning, from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, and the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota. (DD)