This paper reports a bibliometric analysis of two small data sets: a set of 34 papers that make up "The Routledge handbook of vocabulary studies" (Webb, 2020) and a set of papers dealing with second language (L2) vocabulary research taken from a single journal "Frontiers in Psychology." Bibliometric maps based on author…

Digital games have gained significant attention in the field of language education. Among various educational applications, research on digital game-based vocabulary learning (DGBVL) has seen a marked increase in interest and exploration. This study presents a scientometric review based on bibliometric data from the Scopus and Web of Science Core…

In this brief report, we present a scoping review of 31 second language (L2) vocabulary research syntheses published in the Web of Science from January 1990 to May 2022. The purpose of this undertaking was to understand what L2 vocabulary research synthesizers have aggregated and the investigative foci they intended to address. It was observed…

Besides explicit inference of word meanings, associating words with diverse contexts may be a key mechanism underlying vocabulary learning through reading. Drawing from distributional semantic theory, we developed a text modification method called reflash to facilitate both word-context association and explicit inference. Using a set of left and…

This paper represents a summary and discussion of the three studies presented at the morning session of the Fall 2022 JALT Vocabulary SIG. The papers, which were written by Ali Al-Hoorie, Masaki Eguchi, Derek Canning, Stuart McLean, Christopher Nicklin, and Joseph Vitta, represent a range of topics and study designs that are common in recent…

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…

Purpose: A systematic review was performed to determine the extent to which orthographic facilitation, a strategy to improve word learning, has been demonstrated in the literature for children and adolescents from clinical categories such as developmental language disorders (DLD), autism spectrum disorders (ASD), Down syndrome, dyslexia, hearing…

The purpose of this state-of-the-art review is to provide a general overview of recent research on time distribution and second language (L2) learning with special implications for classroom settings. Several studies have been performed to examine how to best distribute the hours of L2 practice to maximize learning by comparing conditions that…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Language exerts a powerful influence on our concepts. We review evidence documenting the developmental origins of a precocious link between language and object categories in very young infants. This collection of studies documents a cascading process in which early links between language and cognition provide the foundation for later, more precise…

Vocabulary can be a key factor for success, central to a language, and paramount to a language learner. In such situation, the lexicon may be the most important component for learners (Grass and Selinker, 1994), and mastering of vocabulary is an essential component of second/foreign language teaching and learning that has been repeatedly…

This paper reviews a selected sample of 24 doctoral dissertations in language assessment (broadly defined), completed between 2006 and 2011 in Canadian universities. These dissertations fall into five thematic categories: 1) reliability, validity and factors affecting test performance; 2) washback (impact) and ethics; 3) raters, rating and rating…

The purpose of this study was to systematically review the factors affecting the language, speech intelligibility, speech production, and lexical tone development of children with hearing loss who use spoken languages other than English. Relevant studies of children with hearing loss published between 2000 and 2011 were reviewed with reference to…

Vocabulary is essential for communicating, reading, thinking, and learning. In comparison to typical hearing peers, students who are deaf or hard of hearing demonstrate vocabulary knowledge that is quantitatively reduced. The authors review and summarize research studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 1967 and 2008 focusing on…

A brief survey of research on second-language (L2) vocabulary focuses on the following: knowledge of the lexicon; lexical simplification; the role of native language to L2 vocabulary development; prototypes; and vocabulary in context. (29 references) (GLR)