Vocabulary is an important foundation for reading skills. Dual-route cascaded model believes that when form-sound correspondence is irregular, phonetic decoding is a necessary but not sufficient condition for word acquisition. Lexical access in syllabic scripts involves a morphological-phonetic-semantic approach, where phonological decoding is…

The present study complemented the extant second language (L2) Age of Acquisition (AoA) normative database by providing over 3500 English L2 words on objective AoA and over 2600 English L2 words on subjective AoA. The correlation between the objective and subjective L2 AoA confirmed the validity of the present database. The objective L2 AoA was…

Background: Prominent theories of reading make the prediction that individual differences in children's word learning capacity determine the pace of their acquisition of reading skill. Despite the developmental nature of some of these theories, most empirical research to date has explored the relation between word learning capacity and reading at…

Core vocabulary lists and vocabulary inventories vary according to language. Lists from one language cannot and should not be assumed to be translatable, as words represent language-specific concepts and grammar. In this manuscript, we (a) present the results of a vocabulary overlap analysis between different published core vocabulary lists in…

This study aimed to investigate the following questions: Does the use of thinking maps and semantic mapping during explicit vocabulary instruction affect content specific science vocabulary knowledge and comprehension in fourth grade students? and What are student perceptions of using thinking maps and semantic maps to learn new vocabulary? To…

A growing body of work suggests that speaker-race influences how infants and toddlers interpret the meanings of words. In two experiments, we explored the role of speaker-race on whether newly learned word-object pairs are generalized to new speakers. Seventy-two 20-month-olds were taught two word-object pairs from a familiar race speaker, and two…

The account that word learning starts in earnest during the second year of life, when infants have mastered the disambiguation skills, has recently been challenged by evidence that infants during the first year already know many common words. The preliminary ability to rapidly map and disambiguate linguistic labels was tested in Italian-speaking…

Proficient reading requires the ability to analyze words for various properties, including pronunciation, meaning, and syntactical function. However, most instruction in word analysis is limited to phonics instruction provided in the early elementary grades. For older students, whose words largely center units of meaning, or morphemes, early…

Nonverbal behavior can impact language proficiency scores in speaking tests, but there is little empirical information of the size or consistency of its effects or whether language proficiency may be a moderating variable. In this study, 100 novice raters watched and scored 30 recordings of test takers taking an international, high stakes…

Words have meanings vastly undetermined by the contexts in which they occur. Their acquisition therefore presents formidable problems of induction. Lila Gleitman and colleagues have advocated for one part of a solution: indirect evidence for a word's meaning may come from its syntactic distribution, via syntactic bootstrapping. But while formal…

Children learn words in a social environment. In my dissertation, I examine how caregivers' social cues facilitate young children's word learning in settings that mirror their typical, dynamic learning environments. In Chapter 1, I overview prior work examining how social cues may support word learning, focusing on possible mechanisms underlying…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After…

Young children often make pragmatic assumptions when learning new words. For example, they assume that a speaker who uses different words intends to refer to different things -- the so-called principle of contrast. We used a standard disambiguation task to explore whether children's assumptions about contrast depend on how much words differ.…

What is vision's role in driving early word production? To answer this, we assessed parent-report vocabulary questionnaires administered to congenitally blind children (N = 40, Mean age = 24 months [R: 7-57 months]) and compared the size and contents of their productive vocabulary to those of a large normative sample of sighted children (N =…

Many words are associated with more than a single meaning. Words are sometimes "ambiguous," applying to unrelated meanings, but the majority of frequent words are "polysemous" in that they apply to multiple "related" meanings. In a preregistered design that included 2 tasks, we tested adults' and 4.5- to 7-year-old…