A large literature suggests that the organization of words in semantic memory, reflecting meaningful relations among words and the concepts to which they refer, supports many cognitive processes, including memory encoding and retrieval, word learning, and inferential reasoning. The co-activation of related items has been proposed as a mechanism by…

How do children succeed in learning a word? Research has shown robustly that, in ambiguous labeling situations, young children assume novel labels to refer to unfamiliar rather than familiar objects. However, ongoing debates center on the underlying mechanism: Is this behavior based on lexical constraints, guided by pragmatic reasoning, or simply…

This study investigates the morphological behavior of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in terms of developing neologisms related to the new requirements imposed by the outbreak of COVID-19. The data of the study was collected from the news reports of Al-Mamlakah TV, as being the most viewed channel in Jordan during the COVID-19 crisis. The findings of…

Age of Acquisition (AoA) scores approximate the age at which a language speaker fully understands a word's semantic meaning and represent a quantitative measure of the relative difficulty of words in a language. AoA word lists exist across various languages, with English having the most complete lists that capture the largest percentage of the…

Japanese is an international language subject offered as an additional language in secondary schools in Malaysia. Japanese language subject begins from Form 1 to Form 5 at the age of 13 to 17. However, composition writing often becomes a problem among students in Japanese language classes due to insufficient mastery of vocabulary and sentence…

This project explores how children disambiguate and retain novel object-label mappings in the face of semantic similarity. Burgeoning evidence suggests that semantic structure in the developing lexicon promotes word learning in ostensive contexts, whereas other findings indicate that semantic similarity interferes with and temporarily slows…

We examined the size, content, and use of evaluative lexis by 26 English monolingual and 20 Spanish-English bilingual 30-month-old children in interaction with their mothers. We extracted the evaluative words, defined as words referring to cognition, volition, or emotion. Controlling for overall vocabulary skills as measured by the MacArthur-Bates…

Children with autism spectrum disorder often have significant language delays. But do they learn language differently than neurotypical toddlers? We compared the lexical skills of 64 preverbal and minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder to 461 vocabulary-size-matched typically developing toddlers. We also examined social features…

This research is aimed at explaining the equation of the Malay vocabulary in the animated film of Upin and Ipin with Banjarese vocabulary in South Kalimantan. In this research, the researcher used a qualitative method with comparative linguistic research design or equation characteristic method of linguistic features. In collecting the data, the…

Vocabulary tests administered on multilingual populations should take into account the unique linguistic and cultural makeup of the population by adopting test development methods that allow responses in several languages. Our aims were to develop a picture-naming test for multilingual Lebanese school-age children (L1: Lebanese, L2: French and/or…

Morphological awareness, or sensitivity to units of meaning, is an essential component of reading comprehension development. Current neurobiological models of reading and dyslexia have largely been built upon phonological processing models, yet reading for meaning is as essential as reading for sound. To fill this gap, the present study explores…

Children with language disorder frequently experience difficulties with vocabulary acquisition, and these difficulties often persist into adolescence. The literature indicates that clinical studies tend to investigate phonological-semantic approaches, whereas educational studies focus on the derivation of meaning within a literacy context. Little…

The present study aimed to construct the piloting phase of a more extensive investigation on the effectiveness of the keyword technique, rote memorisation and semantic mapping as vocabulary learning methods in word retention rates of 16 third-grade pre-service teachers studying at English Language Teaching Department of a large Turkish university.…

Although there is a broad consensus that both the procedural and declarative memory systems play a crucial role in language learning, use, and knowledge, the mapping between linguistic types and memory structures remains underspecified: by default, a dual-route mapping of language systems to memory systems is assumed, with declarative memory…

This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…