Despite many years of investigation into implicit learning in nonlinguistic domains, the potential for implicit learning to deliver the kinds of generalizations that underlie natural language competence remains unclear. In a series of experiments, we investigated implicit learning of the semantic preferences of novel verbs, specifically, whether…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between conservation status and relational terms by means of the semantic differential. Sixty-one children classified according to Piaget's three levels of conservation development judged the relational terms "more" and "less" on concrete semantic differential…

Discusses basic models of the processes of translation, second language teaching and learning, and semantization. A judicious use of many procedures is urged, because translation is present in the semantization process regardless of method used. It is noted that considerable research is still needed. (AMH)

Earlier version of this article was presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, December 28, 1968. (VM)

This book describes how the child acquires a linguistic system before he is capable of verbal utterances or has developed the ability to structure language in a meaningful way. The first chapter of the book contains a discussion of previous language development studies on learning the mother tongue and proposes a hypothesis of language development…

This is a study of the kinds of processes involved in learning the meaning of individual lexical items, and in particular how the acquisition of lexical meaning is related to the cognitive structuring of events on the one hand and the ability to produce syntactic paraphrases of a word's meaning and other related constructions on the other. It is…

In a recent paper (1977) Levenston and Blum suggested that lexical simplification operates according to universal principles, and that these derive from the individual's semantic competence in his mother tongue. This paper examines the validity of this suggestion by means of a comparative study of lexical simplification in three different…

Certain proposed theories on second language acquisition, their justifications, and their predictions about English are examined in this paper. The first section discusses the process of second language acquisition; the stages and strategies learners use and progress through on their way to mastery are described. The second section discusses the…