Vocabulary instruction is addressed on two levels in this article: 1) the importance of direct teaching and 2) using the books of a popular children's series as examples to support these vocabulary lessons. Also addressed are specific methods of turning classrooms into places where vocabulary instruction is effective and enjoyable. Elements of…

A fundamental assumption regarding spoken language is that the relationship between sound and meaning is essentially arbitrary. The present investigation questioned this "arbitrariness" assumption by examining the influence of potential non-arbitrary mappings between sound and meaning on word learning in adults. Native English-speaking…

Infants follow the gaze of an individual with whom they are directly interacting by the end of the first year. By 18 months infants are capable of learning novel words in observational (or third-party) contexts (Floor & Akhtar, 2006). To examine third-party gaze following in 12- and 18-month-olds, the parent and experimenter engaged in a…

Word frequency and semantic priming effects are among the most robust effects in visual word recognition, and it has been generally assumed that these two variables produce interactive effects in lexical decision performance, with larger priming effects for low-frequency targets. The results from four lexical decision experiments indicate that the…

In the present visual-world experiment, participants were presented with visual displays that included a target item that was a semantic associate of an abstract or a concrete word. This manipulation allowed us to test a basic prediction derived from the qualitatively different representational framework that supports the view of different…

The purpose of the two experiments reported here was to investigate whether bilingualism confers an advantage on children's conversational understanding. A total of 163 children aged 3-6 years were given a Conversational Violations Test to determine their ability to identify responses to questions as violations of Gricean maxims of conversation…

This study investigated the role of auditory selective attention capacities as a possible mediator of the well-established association between verbal short-term memory (STM) and vocabulary development. A total of 47 6- and 7-year-olds were administered verbal immediate serial recall and auditory attention tasks. Both task types probed processing…

We comment on Goldstein, Davidoff, and Roberson's replication and extension ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102", 219-238 [2009]) of our study of the effect of toddlers' color term knowledge on their categorical perception (CP) of color ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 90", 114-141 [2005]). First, we discuss how best to…

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children's ability to rapidly learn novel words through direct reference and through novel mapping (i.e., inferring that a novel word refers to a novel object) was examined. Ninety-eight DHH children, ranging from 27 to 82 months old, drawn from 12 schools in five states participated. In two tasks that differed in…

Vocabulary knowledge is strongly associated with reading achievement and becomes increasingly predictive of overall reading proficiency as children progress through the elementary grades. Children who are d/Deaf and hard of hearing often begin schooling with small meaning vocabularies, a disadvantage that puts them at risk of struggling to learn…

Do word problems and math vocabulary confuse students in your mathematics classes? Do simple keywords like "value" and "portion" seem to mislead them? Many words that students already know can have a different meaning in mathematics. To grasp that difference, students need to connect English literacy skills to math. Successful students speak,…

Faculty and graduate students in the Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison engage in a broad spectrum of research. From Professor Sally Magnan's research on study abroad and Professor Monika Chavez's work in foreign language policy through Professor Richard Young's examination of…

Concern has been expressed about teaching English to the fifth- and the sixth graders in the public schools of Japan. There appears to be an insufficiency of materials as well as anxiety among teachers who must instruct these grades. Story telling may be an important step for developing English competence. The current study replicated the work of…

Flash cards have been shown to be useful for teaching sight-word reading. To date, the most effective flash-card instruction method is incremental rehearsal (IR). This method involves the instructor interspersing unknown stimulus items into the presentation of known stimulus items. In this study, we compared IR to a modified IR…

Eighty-one Korean children were tested once a year across Grades 4, 5, and 6 on Korean phonological and morphological awareness, speeded-naming, Hangul word recognition, Hangul spelling, and English word reading. With age, gender, and Korean vocabulary knowledge statistically controlled, both phonological awareness and speeded-naming were uniquely…