This study investigated the roles of associative learning and linguistic knowledge, in particular phonological and semantic knowledge, in word learning of Chinese readers using a cross-sectional design. Extending past research in associative learning using existing Chinese characters as word stimuli, this study resorted to pseudowords and invented…

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical representations (semantic relatedness); as such, it…