This study compared the effectiveness of deductive instruction and guided inductive instruction for developing semantic radical knowledge of Chinese characters. The evaluation was conducted through a quasi-experimental 3-week intervention involving 46 intermediate learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The results indicated that guided…

A study had been conducted in qualitative design employing phenomenology approach to examine the cognitive basis and the semantic structure of phenomena based reasoning of lower secondary school students in Ambon. The data of the study were collected by using a test. Phenomena stimulus of science was given to the informants in the form of…

The authors present a Bayesian framework for understanding how adults and children learn the meanings of words. The theory explains how learners can generalize meaningfully from just one or a few positive examples of a novel word's referents, by making rational inductive inferences that integrate prior knowledge about plausible word meanings with…

This research examines the relationship between the concept of CAUSE as it is characterized in psychological models of causation and the meaning of causal verbs, such as the verb "cause" itself. According to focal set models of causation ([Cheng (1997]; [Cheng and Novick (1991 and Cheng and Novick (1992]), the concept of CAUSE should be more…

A discussion of the application of artificial intelligence to natural language processing looks at several problems in language comprehension, involving semantic ambiguity, anaphoric reference, and metonymy. Examples of these problems are cited, and the importance of the computational approach in analyzing them is explained. The approach applies…

An analysis of the role of the word "hence" and its near-synonyms examines the relationship between logic as a science, as a natural language, and as argumentation. The analysis is done in the context of elementary propositional logic. The first section is a limited discussion of the standard logician's treatment relegating "hence" to the realm of…

Examined whether the use of superordinate terms in 206 children's definitions is predictable by relevance theory. Children (ages 5-10) gave definitions for 16 basic-level words and 4 superordinate words from natural kind and artifact semantic domains. Superordinate terms were used more frequently when they supported more inferences. Findings…

Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms ("some", "might", "or") (cf. Braine & Rumain, 1981; Smith, 1980). More recent studies suggest, however, that children's apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou…

A theory of deductive reasoning is presented for inferences that depend on multiply quantified premises. It is argued that reasoners construct mental models based on their knowledge of the meaning of the quantifiers. Three experiments, with 54 university students and adults, corroborated the theory. (SLD)

A comparison of the performance of children (ages 6-12) with visual impairments (n=15) and sighted children (n=15) on two tasks involving inferences found some differences between the two groups when the information was visual, but not when it was nonvisual. Visual impairment affected some aspects of a word association task. (Contains references.)…