Although identifying the referents of single words is often cited as a key challenge for getting word learning off the ground, it overlooks the fact that young learners consistently encounter words in the context of other words. How does this company help or hinder word learning? Prior investigations into early word learning from children's…

We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children's real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames ("Look at the…" vs. "Examine the…"), followed by nouns that were…

Researchers have studied children's exposure to television and the impact it has on children's academic development, and have discovered that educational television programs may positively influence children's vocabulary growth (Fuenzalida, 2017; Heintz & Wartella, 2012; Larson & Rhan, 2015; Linebarger, Moses, Liebeskind, & McMenamin,…

Tiered vocabulary is a pervasive concept in academic scholarship, education policy, and schools. It involves placing individual words into hierarchically arranged tiers, based on their apparent simplicity, sophistication, utility, and complexity, with these categorisations used to determine which words carry value in the classroom. In this article…

Learning vocabulary is a central and time-consuming endeavour for a language learner and it has thus been suggested that the foreign language classroom has to supply explicit support for students' vocabulary development. A major source of explicit word focus is vocabulary exercises in teaching materials and students' learning can be facilitated if…

What makes a word easy to learn? Early-learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We…

Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children's vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is known about any differences in the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens…

A text recommendation system helps language learners find suitable reading materials. Similar to graded readers, most systems assign difficulty levels or school grades to the documents in their database, and then identify the documents that best match the language proficiency of the learner. This graded approach has two main limitations. First,…

Previous research on the effects of word-level factors on lexical acquisition has shown that frequency and concreteness are most important. Here, we investigate CDI data from 1,030 Dutch children, collected with the short form of the Dutch CDI, to address (i) how word-level factors predict lexical acquisition, once child-level factors are…

Knowledge of derivational affixes makes an important contribution to second language learners' success when reading. Yet while the effects of some learner variables (L2 proficiency, L1 background) have been investigated, there has been little research addressing the effects of varying characteristics of affixes on their acquisition. The goal of…

Vocabulary knowledge has been recognized as a crucial component in learning and teaching of both native and non-native learners, text understanding, and educational success (Coxhead, 2018; Saeedi et al., 2023; Schmitt et al., 2021), leading to the development of word lists for different purposes. Hence, this study aimed at developing a newspaper…

Vocabulary is a fundamental component of language usage, and study into its interactions with other aspects of language competence is an essential topic of language teaching. There are strong relationships between vocabulary and language competency measurements. Learners with larger vocabularies are better at a variety of language abilities than…

This quantitative study examines the Lexile level, estimated volume, and genre of fourth- and fifth-grade texts used in four popular core reading series to analyze the programs' possible effects on instruction and comprehension. The four series include Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Into Reading, Lucy Calkins' Units of Study for Teaching Reading,…

High frequency words, which are key to a text, must be mastered to achieve minimum levels of reading proficiency. However, knowledge about the frequency of items in a language is very limited. Given this consideration, WordSift (www.wordsift.org), a word cloud tool based on high frequency and key words can assist English as a Foreign Language…

Research has indicated that lexical richness is an important indicator of second language (L2) proficiency. However, most research has examined written, cross-sectional English L2 corpora and does not necessarily indicate how spoken lexical use develops over time or whether observed trends are stable across L2s. This study adds to previous…