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…

This study investigated the effects of individual word frequency, collocational frequency, and association on L1 and L2 collocational processing. An acceptability judgment task was administered to L1 and L2 speakers of English. Response times were analyzed using mixed-effects modeling for 3 types of adjective-noun pairs: (a) high-frequency, (b)…

Research suggests that second language words are learned faster when they are similar in phonological structure or accent to the words of an individual's first language. Many major theories suggest this happens because of differences in frequency of exposure and context between first and second language words. Here, we examine the independent…

The article presents the procedure and results of a linguistic experimental study of the cognitive characteristics underlying basic ideas about patriotism in the modern Russian language consciousness as identified by the author from previous studies of the semantic content of the concept of PATRIOTISM in accordance with language data. The purpose…

CHALLENGE is generally perceived as a negative word synonymous with "dispute," "defy," "confrontation," and "contest." However, when resorting to dictionary definitions, CHALLENGE has unexpectedly been found to possess positive senses such as "stimulating" and "arousing competitive…

Humans are remarkably sensitive to the statistical structure of language. However, different mechanisms have been proposed to account for such statistical sensitivities. The present study compared adult learning of syntax and the ability of two models of statistical learning to simulate human performance: Simple Recurrent Networks, which learn by…

This paper describes a set of simulations which explore the way different features of lexical organisation affect the probability of finding a pair of associated words in a set of five randomly selected words. The simulation is equivalent to giving Ss a set of five words and asking if they can identify a pair of associated words among them. The…

Argues that much of language acquisition is sequence learning and that the resultant long-term knowledge base of language sequences serves as the database for grammar acquisition. The article also proposes mechanisms to analyze sequence information that result in knowledge of underlying grammar. (184 references) (Author/CK)

This document is the seventh report in the Language Research in Progress (LRIP) series, and lists a wide variety of language-related research projects current between April 1968 and November 1968. Research projects terminated in the six months prior to publication are included as well. Approximately 250 projects in the U.S. and abroad are…