As education increasingly shifts towards a technology-driven model, artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT are gaining recognition for their potential to enhance educational support. In university education and MOOC environments, students often select courses that align with their specific needs. During this process, access to information…

English, and presumably any natural language, contains a small group of expressions referring to species of things found in nature. These species are defined by their internal structure, determined by genetics in the case of living things and by chemical or physical properties in the case of others. The reference of these terms is determined by…

A major concern in recent research is whether perceptual or functional information is of primary importance in children's early word meanings. In the study described here, artificial objects were used so that form and function could be independently manipulated. There were 57 subjects, ranging in age from 2.5 years to adulthood. The subjects were…

A discussion of agency looks at cross-linguistic evidence concerning the place of volition, animacy, and person in a model of agentivity. Two views of agentivity are presented as complementary rather than mutually contradictory. Data from Lhasa Tibetan that support a less restrictive notion of agency than is often assumed are presented. In this…

The linguistic form of a nonliteral expression, and the context in which it occurs, can greatly influence young children's succcess or failure in assigning a meaning to a figurative expression. Experiments have shown that the same metaphorical expression can be easier to understand when expressed in a linguistic form that is familiar to young…

This study explored the relationship between conceptual level, a social cognitive variable, and second language communicative competence. The subjects were female secondary school students in five second-year French classes. The research hypotheses stated that conceptual level was related to the development of communicative competence while…

A study investigated the interaction of cognitive, cultural, and linguistic factors in second-language concept formation in adults. Specifically, it examined how seven college students in a lower-division intensive Spanish class developed new gender concepts when learning a second language. Course instruction focused on concept construction at…

A fundamental problem in language acquisition is determining how children learn the formal vocabulary of the adult grammar. A proposed solution is the Semantic Bootstrapping Hypothesis (SBH), which states that children infer the identity of syntactic entities such as "subject" in input based on the presence of semantic entities such as…

A study investigated whether very young children use the concept of mutual exclusivity to make an initial link between a word and an object, and whether its use is linked to age or intelligence differences. Three groups of normally-developing children, aged 1 to 3 years, and three groups of older, mildly retarded children with similar levels of…

Listening is a crucial element in the communication process. To date, however, research efforts have been unsuccessful in identifying the proper role that listening should play in the building of communication theory. To be a legitimate part of the communication process, listening must be placed in a conceptual framework similar to those found in…

Explanations for differences in reading proficiency should be constructed around an atlas of reading-related individual differences in cognition. Such an atlas should include well-documented "bottom-up", text-driven reading strategies and less thoroughly investigated "top-down", schema-driven reading strategies. Research…

This study focused on how French children aged 4, 6, and 8 years evaluate the conditions of use for modal expressions marking certainty and uncertainty in discourse. Children were shown films involving verbal interactions during which one of the protagonists produced a target utterance accusing another character of having performed a deed. Each…

A study investigated children's difficulty in learning color words and attempted to determine whether the difficulty was perceptual, conceptual, or linguistic. The subjects were 24 two-year-olds, half with knowledge of color words and half without, and a similar control group. The experimental subjects were given conceptual and comprehension tasks…

The relationship between language, thought, and concept formation has been a central issue in many studies and theoretical discussions in various domains--philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. The relation between language and concept development can be framed as two opposing questions: (1) Does the child learn concepts first and…

Two studies of concept development and categorization among 1-, 2-, and 3-year-old children suggest that concept formation is a socially guided process involving convergence on an adult model. Convergence in labeling is an early strategy for shaping children's category boundaries, while later, more elaborate linguistic means are used to…