Research has established positive associations between informal digital activities and vocabulary knowledge. However, understanding how different types of digital activities relate to various aspects of vocabulary knowledge is limited. This study examined how the purpose of informal digital activities and strategic engagement during and/or after…

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…

Previous research indicates that long-term memory (LTM) may contribute to performance in working memory (WM) tasks. Across 3 experiments, we investigated the extent to which active maintenance in WM can be replaced by relying on information stored in episodic LTM, thereby freeing capacity for additional information in WM. First, participants…

Associative learning strategy (ALS) is an important means of acquiring vocabulary--especially in L2 learning. This study proposes a method to identify the associative learning mechanism based on complex network theory. First, a distributed association strategy (DAS) for the associative learning of L2 learners based on distributed language learning…

Identifying the referent of novel words is a complex process that young children do with relative ease. When given multiple objects along with a novel word, children select the most novel item, sometimes retaining the word-referent link. Prior work is inconsistent, however, on the role of object novelty. Two experiments examine 18-month-old…

Associative word learning, i.e., associating a word with an object, is an important building block of early word learning for TD infants. This study investigated the development of word-I object associations by TD infants and infants and toddlers with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic disorder associated with delayed language and cognitive…

The topic of physical and chemical changes is one of the basic and essential issues of both the lowersecondary school science curriculum and the upper-secondary school chemistry curriculum in many countries. The focus of the present study is to investigate the students' cognitive structures on the topic of physical and chemical changes at…

A large body of evidence shows an animacy effect on memory in that animate entities are better remembered than inanimate ones. Yet, the reason for this mnemonic prioritization remains unclear. In the survival processing literature, the assumption that richness of encoding is responsible for adaptive memory benefits has received substantial…

This paper presents students' word associations with terms regarding the Wadden Sea. A continuous free word-association method was used in which the students from secondary schools (n = 3119, average age: 13.54 years) reported their associations with the stimulus words "Wadden Sea," "mudflat hiking tour," and "tides"…

This study aims to determine the changes in the cognitive structures of the 35 participants after ecology-based nature education in Bursa Uludag and its vicinity. This study used a single group pretest-posttest experimental mode where the data was collected by a word association test. It included the key concepts of nature, national parks,…

This paper examined factors affecting Korean EFL learners' word association types in their L2 mental lexicon. Specifically, vocabulary size of the learners was examined to see if it had any significant relationship with word association types. To this end, experiment procedures that included vocabulary size test and the lexical decision task as…

The development of beginning decoding and encoding skills is influenced by linguistic skills as well as executive functions (EFs). These higher-level cognitive processes include working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, and individual differences in these EFs have been shown to contribute to early academic learning. The present study…

Recent semantic space models learn vector representations for word meanings by observing statistical redundancies across a text corpus. A word's meaning is represented as a point in a high-dimensional semantic space, and semantic similarity between words is quantified by a function of their spatial proximity (typically the cosine of the angle…

The development of beginning decoding and encoding skills is influenced by linguistic skills as well as executive functions (EFs). These higher-level cognitive processes include working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, and individual differences in these EFs have been shown to contribute to early academic learning. The present study…

The authors examined whether individual differences in fluid intelligence (gF) modulate the testing effect. Participants studied Swahili--English word pairs and repeatedly studied half the pairs or attempted retrieval, with feedback, for the remaining half. Word pairs were easy or difficult to learn. Overall, participants showed a benefit of…