This article examines whether changes in the ethnic minority composition of the standardization sample for the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III (PPVT-III) can be used as the sole explanation for children's better test scores when compared to an earlier edition. Analysis suggests other factors may explain improved performance. (Contains…

Argues that much of language acquisition is sequence learning and that the resultant long-term knowledge base of language sequences serves as the database for grammar acquisition. The article also proposes mechanisms to analyze sequence information that result in knowledge of underlying grammar. (184 references) (Author/CK)

Analyzes changes in oral communication skills of five American adult learners who participated in a five-week study abroad program in Spanish. Subjective analysis of recordings of participants upon their return show that four participants increased their command of the vocabulary and were more at ease in discourse interaction. (14 references)…

Discusses the value of content considerations in the design of language tests and the implications of the findings of various investigations of content analysis. The article argues that content analysis can be viewed as the application of a model of test design to a particular measurement instrument, using judgments of trained analysts. (26…

A kindergarten teacher and a language development teacher collaborated in using a thematic literature activity, in which kindergartners focused on a book which was read to them, discussed it, and engaged in related dramatic play; discussed feelings and drew pictures; and recalled earlier sessions of the activity. The kindergarten teacher extended…

Proposes that an important role for connectionist research in language acquisition is analyzing what linguistic information is present in the child's input. Recent connectionist and statistical work analyzing the properties of real language corpora suggest a priori objections against the utility of distributional information are misguided. This…

A study explored working memory (WM) capacity, WM task requirements, as well as effects between WM, skills, knowledge base, and intelligence in adults with mental retardation and children aged 3-6 years. Adults were better on measures reflecting skills and knowledge base. Children performed better in phonological and visuo-spatial WM tasks.…

Investigates effects of two advance organizers--question previewing and vocabulary preteaching--on Taiwanese college students' listening comprehension of English language videotapes. Results suggest the group exposed to a combined treatment of vocabulary preteaching and question viewing between two video viewings outperformed the groups who…

This article provides teachers of middle and high school students with strategies and recommended activities for vocabulary instruction. Specifically, it discusses teaching vocabulary through drama, semantic mapping, video technology, the Keyword Method, and active student responding activities. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Investigates a pedagogical approach to identifying and bridging the gap between cultural prototypes in second language lexical meaning acquisition. Within the framework of prototype theory and a sociocultural perspective,argues that lexical meaning is culturally situated and the teaching and learning of a culturally loaded word may be achieved by…

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the effects of American music, lyrics, vocabulary definitions, and song explanations during online music study on listening comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, and lifestyle literacy in Taiwanese ESL learners. One-hundred-eight ESL learners from 2 large comprehensive universities in Taiwan…

This study examined the relationship between learners' incidental vocabulary acquisition and their level of proficiency, and between acquisition and word frequency in a text. Participants were Turkish learners of English at three proficiency levels. One reading text and four vocabulary tests were administered over a two-week period. Analyses of…

Picture naming and picture identification tasks were used to investigate lexical-semantic skills in young children learning Hmong as a first language (L1) and English as a second language (L2). A total of 19 children, ages 3; 4 (years; months)-5; 2, participated in this study. Performance on lexical tasks was analyzed as a function of development…

Infants parse speech into word-sized units according to biases that develop in the first year. One bias, present before the age of 7 months, is to cluster syllables that tend to co-occur. The present computational research demonstrates that this statistical clustering bias could lead to the extraction of speech sequences that are actual words,…

The Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg and Patterson (1996) connectionist model of reading was evaluated at two points early in its training against reading data collected from British children on two occasions during their first year of literacy instruction. First, the network's non-word reading was poor relative to word reading when compared with the…