The majority of L2 vocabulary studies concentrate on learning word meaning and provide learners with opportunities for semantic elaboration (i.e., focus on word meaning). However, in initial vocabulary learning, engaging in structural elaboration (i.e., focus on word form) with a view to acquiring L2 word form is equally important. The present…

The present study investigated the effects of two types of core-image-based basic verb learning approaches: the learner-centered and the teacher-centered approaches. The learner-centered approach was an activity in which participants found semantic relationships among several definitions of each basic target verb through a picture-elucidated card…

Well-developed lexical representations are important for reading comprehension, but there have been no prior attempts to track growth in the depth of knowledge of particular words. This article examines increases in depth of vocabulary knowledge in 4-5-year-old preschool students (n = 240) who participated in a vocabulary intervention that taught…

The purpose of this study was to understand vocabulary characteristics in toddlers who are late talkers (LT) as compared with age-matched (AM) and vocabulary-matched (VM) peers. The semantic categories (e.g., animals, foods, toys) and the percentage of nouns, verbs, and closed-class words in the vocabularies of 36 toddlers (12 LT, 12 AM, 12 VM)…

The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding…

In vocabulary research there has been a shift from focusing on single words to considering multiword sequences, such as collocations. Despite the general consensus among language researchers that collocation is essential to effective language use in real-world communication, particularly oral communication, language-testing researchers have made…

Disambiguation refers to children's tendency to assign novel labels to unfamiliar rather than familiar referents. It is employed as a word-learning strategy, but it remains unknown whether it is a domain-specific phenomenon or a manifestation of more general pragmatic competence. To assess the domain-specificity and development of disambiguation,…

How do children resolve the problem of indeterminacy when learning a new word? By one account, children adopt a "taxonomic assumption" and expect the word to denote only members of a particular taxonomic category. According to one version of this constraint, young children should represent polysemous words that label multiple kinds--for…

The terms used to designate ordinary relational identities seem easy to learn and translate. However, these interpersonal identities reflect complex mental constructs that are very sensitive to the variables that interact in human communication, particularly cultural variation. This paper describes a pilot project developed at the University of…

We investigated the associations between teacher-rated and direct assessments of early elementary students' speech and language skills to explore whether using teachers as primary screeners yielded assessment data that reliably identified young students with language difficulties who many need a more comprehensive evaluation. We assessed first-…

The extent to which learners benefit from instruction may be largely dependent on their individual abilities. However, there is relatively little work on the interaction between instructional effectiveness in second language learning and learner individual factors. In this study, we investigated the relationship between instruction, individual…

Acquiring the correct meanings of words expressing quantities ("seven, most") and qualities ("red, spotty") present a challenge to learners. Understanding how children succeed at this requires understanding, not only of what kinds of data are available to them, but also the biases and expectations they bring to the learning…

Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here. First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies. Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that…

This aim of this article is to contribute to the development of a socio-cultural model of emergent biliteracy that recognizes the dynamic interactions amongst two languages. The present field study took place in a French-German public Kindergarten class in Alsace, France, where students are in the initial process of learning to read in both…

This article reports results of a longitudinal study of vocabulary breadth knowledge growth, vocabulary fluency development, and the relationship between the two. We administered two versions of the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT; Nation 1983; Nation 1990; Schmitt et al. 2001) to 300 students at a Chinese university at three different time points…