Some research has posited a natural order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes common to all learners of English as a Second Language. This meta-analysis investigated whether a combination of five determinants--perceptual salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency) accounts for a…

Examined whether phonological information was activated automatically in processing two kanji compound words. In one experiment, participants judged whether pairs of words were homophones, while others judged whether pairs were synonyms. In the second, participants were asked to make one of the two judgments, as in experiment one. Findings support…

This article discusses three claims of the Graded Salience Hypothesis presented in Rachel Giora's book "On our mind". It is argued that these claims may give second language researchers the chance to revise the way they think about word meaning, the literal meaning-figurative meaning dichotomy and the role of context in language…

One of the genuine contributions of theoretical linguistics to the interdisciplinary field of applied linguistics is to elucidate the nature of "what should be taught" and "how it should be taught". Traditionally, the input supplied in vocabulary teaching has consisted either of word lists (most often) or of words-in-context…

This study investigates L2 learners' use of French derivational processes and their strategies as they form agent nouns. It also attempts to find out which of the acquisitional principles (conventionality, semantic transparency, formal simplicity, and productivity) advanced by Clark (1993, 2003) for various L1s acquisition of word formation…

Based on empirical research and qualitative analysis, this paper aims to explore the effects of L1 use on L2 vocabulary teaching. The results show that, during L2 vocabulary teaching process, the proper application of L1 can effectively facilitate the memorization of new words, and the bilingual method (both English explanation and Chinese…

Gives sample sentences showing the connection between grammatical and lexical semantic relationships, which present a complicated set of directions and rules for the learner. Methods are suggested for differentiating by category the meanings of ambiguous words. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Beyond the first several thousand most commonly used words in a language, direct vocabulary instruction is not efficient. Use of inferential skills then becomes the most effective way of learning new vocabulary; it is the way native speakers build their 60,000 word vocabularies. Because the skill is not automatically transferable, it must be…

Discusses the various uses of visual and audiovisual aids in language instruction. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Foreign language teaching concentrates on phonology, morphology and syntax, to the neglect of semantics and vocabulary. The method of teaching meaning that is proposed here is based on the concepts of "contextual" semantics. An experiment in the use of the method is also briefly described. (KM)

The ability of children to process words printed in a second language was studied over the course of a school year as the children acquired increasing familiarity with the language. The children, ranging in age from 5 to 15 years, represented four ability groups with respect to their reading skills in their first and second languages. A…

A word association test was given in French to 76 girls learning French to determine whether their responses matched those given by native speakers. Three types of responses are possible in such a test: syntagmatic, where one word cues another that usually occurs with it ("bread" elicits "butter"); paradigmatic, which is of the same form class as…

The author considers controversial psycholinguistic problems in the study of first and second language acquisition, raising such questions as whether all children learn language in the same way, and whether all languages are learned in the same way. Her observations, based partially on observing her own bilingual child, suggest that the cenematic…