The processes tapped by the widely-used word association (WA) paradigm remain a matter of debate: while some authors consider them as driven by lexical co-occurrences, others emphasize the role of meaning-based connections. To test these contrastive hypotheses, we analyzed responses in a WA task in terms of their normative defining features (those…

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…

This Special Issue of "Language Learning" presents an interdisciplinary state-of-the-art overview of current approaches to linguistic relativity. It contains empirical and theoretical studies and reflections on linguistic relativity from a variety of perspectives, such as associative learning, conceptual transfer, multilingual awareness,…

This paper investigates the ways readers use two semantic tools, synonymy and entailment, when responding to reading-comprehension questions. After a brief overview of semantic theory, two reading passages and their attendant multiple-choice questions are analyzed, demonstrating how readers might choose the correct answer by analyzing the way it…