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…

Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

Vocabulary knowledge strongly predicts second language reading, listening, writing, and speaking. Yet, few tests have been developed to assess vocabulary knowledge in French. The primary aim of this pilot study was to design and initially validate the Context-Aligned Two Thousand Test (CA-TTT), following open research practices. The CA-TTT is a…

This paper examines links between perfect rhymes and text readability and decoding using a measure of English rhymes called the Perfect Rhymes Dictionary (PeRDict). PeRDict is based on the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary (the CMUdict) and provides rhyme counts for ~48,000 words in English and for the most frequent 1,000, 2,500,…

Vocabulary knowledge is one of the most important elements of reading comprehension. Text coverage is the proportion of known words in a given text. We hypothesize that text comprehension increases exponentially with text coverage due to network effects and activation of prior knowledge. In addition, the lexical threshold hypothesis states that…

In this study, we investigated the accuracy of first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' intuitive judgments of phrasal frequency and collocation strength, and examined the linguistic influences that give rise to these judgments. L1 and L2 speakers of English judged 180 adjective-noun collocations as (a) high frequency, medium…

Recent studies suggest that developing L2 receptive knowledge of single words is associated with increased receptive knowledge of collocations. However, no study to date has directly examined the interrelationship between productive word knowledge and productive collocation knowledge. To address this gap, the present study administered a…

Assessment of text readability is important for assigning texts at the appropriate level to readers at different proficiency levels. The present research approached readability assessment from the lexical perspective of word frequencies derived from corpora assumed to reflect typical language experience. Three studies were conducted to test how…

The frequency and contextual predictability of words have a fundamental role in determining "where" and "when" the eyes move during reading in both alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages. However, surprising little is known about the how the influence of these variables develops, although this is important for understanding…

Providing a choice is desirable and helpful to learning motivation and task processing. This study explored how choice and achievement goals affect motivation and reward awareness using the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique. Twenty-four college students participated in this study, in which a 2 × 2 factorial design (choice/no…

This longitudinal study explored the roles of item- and learner-related variables in L2 learners' development of productive collocation knowledge (L1 = Dutch; L2 = German; NLearners= 50). Learners' form recall knowledge of 35 target collocations was measured three times over a 3-year period. The item-related variables investigated were L1-L2…

Recently researchers have proposed using information from teachers and learners to supplement the information from corpora in the selection of the most useful words for foreign language learners. Yet the extent to which these data sets correlate to one another is unclear. This study explicitly investigated the relationships between (a) the lexical…

Social media continues to be an ever-present part of people's lives. One of the largest social media websites, Reddit has more than 430 million unique visitors monthly. What is unknown to scholars is how gifted education fits into this modern form of communication. In our research, we examined how gifted education is discussed over Reddit using…

Children's remarkable ability to generalize beyond the input and the resulting overregularizations/ irregularizations provide a platform for a discussion of whether morphology learning uses analogy-based, rule-based, or statistical learning procedures. The present study, testing 115 children (aged 3 to 10) on an elicited production task,…

The present study was aimed at investigating whether and how image characteristics influence written naming performance in adults. In three different sessions, participants had to quickly write down the names of pictured objects on a graphic tablet. Across sessions, the picture format was different, but the to-be-named objects were the same: There…