How does one assess developmental change when the measures themselves change with development? Most developmental studies of word learning use either looking (infants) or pointing (preschoolers and older). With little empirical evidence of the relationship between the two measures, developmental change is difficult to assess. This paper analyzes…

Word learning studies traditionally examine the narrow link between words and objects, indifferent to the rich contextual information surrounding objects. This research examined whether children attend to this contextual information and construct an associative matrix of the words, objects, people, and environmental context during word learning.…

Just Face It presents seven "faces" codified by Paul Ekman, Wallace Friesen and Joseph Hager, which can be linked through a kinesthetic process of association with vocabulary words that are frequently encountered on standardized college admission tests. The article is based on "Method for Facilitating Contextual Vocabulary…

In many domains, learners extract recurring units from continuous sequences. For example, in unknown languages, fluent speech is perceived as a continuous signal. Learners need to extract the underlying words from this continuous signal and then memorize them. One prominent candidate mechanism is statistical learning, whereby learners track how…

The issues of depth vocabulary knowledge and Willingness to Communicate (henceforth, WTC) are among the most important issues in second language learning. The present study set out to empirically look into the contribution of WTC to depth of vocabulary knowledge in L2 learning. To this end, 88 English L2 learners, divided into two groups in terms…

It is widely accepted that associative recognition can be supported by familiarity through integrating more than two stimuli into a unit, but there are still three unsolved questions: (1) how unitization affects recollection-based associative recognition; (2) whether it is necessary to match the level of unitization (LOU) between original and…

Published work on vocabulary assessment has grown substantially in the last 10 years, but it is still somewhat outside the mainstream of the field. There has been a recent call for those developing vocabulary tests to apply professional standards to their work, especially in validating their instruments for specified purposes before releasing them…

An important component of reading comprehension is the reader's capacity to make inferences that can maintain the coherence between propositions within the text. However, the cognitive and linguistic skills that underlie online inference making remain elusive. The authors aimed to clarify the effects of vocabulary and text comprehension on…

Purpose: This study compares responses of children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) who use spoken language with responses of children who have typical hearing on a repeated word association task to evaluate lexical-semantic organization. Method: This study included 109 participants in early kindergarten or who had completed first grade. The…

This study aimed to establish normative data for 145 words using phonological and semantic association tasks with 242 French schoolchildren, ranging from ages 5 (Grande Section) to 8 (Cours Elémentaire 2), providing a fundamental resource for future research and educational planning. The participants were engaged in two primary tasks: a free…

Research has shown that learning a known-and-unknown word combination leads to greater learning than learning an unknown word alone (Kasahara, 2010, 2011). These studies found that attaching a known adjective to an unknown noun can help learners remember the unknown noun. Kasahara (2015) found that a known verb can serve as an effective cue to…

In this series of experiments, we tested the limits of young infants' word learning and generalization abilities in light of recent findings reporting sophisticated word learning abilities in the first year of life. Ten-month-old infants were trained with two word-object pairs and tested with either the same or different members of the…

This study explored the role of word knowledge dimensions in second language (L2) word-meaning inference. College-level L2 learners (N = 121) participated in this study and completed a series of word knowledge tests including vocabulary size, word associates, morpheme-form knowledge, morpheme-meaning knowledge, morpheme discrimination, and…

Since its modern inception in the late nineteenth century, research on word associations has developed into a large and diverse area of study, including work with both applied linguistic and psycholinguistic orientations. However, despite significant recent interest in the use of word association to investigate second language (L2) vocabulary…

Some words have more than one translation across languages. Such translation-ambiguous words are harder to learn, recognize, and produce for individuals across the language learning spectrum. Past research demonstrates that learning both translations of translation-ambiguous words on consecutive trials confers an accuracy advantage relative to…