Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate children's use of semantic context to facilitate foreign-accented word recognition in noise. Method: Monolingual American English speaking 5- to 7-year-olds (n = 168) repeated either Mandarin- or American English-accented sentences in babble, half of which contained final words that were highly…

Wide vocabulary knowledge is associated with proficiency in reading comprehension and scores on tests involving comprehension. Yet assessments show that U.S. students at various grade levels have demonstrated no improvement in their vocabulary knowledge since 2009. Literacy expert Timothy Rasinski and colleagues argue that students need improved…

In this study, we investigated how activation unfolds in sign production by examining whether signs that are not produced have their representations activated by semantics (cascading of activation). Deaf signers were tested with a picture-picture interference task. Participants were presented with pairs of overlapping pictures and named the green…

In the blocked-cyclic naming paradigm, participants repeatedly name small sets of objects that do or do not belong to the same semantic category. A standard finding is that, after a first presentation cycle where one might find semantic facilitation, naming is slower in related (homogeneous) than in unrelated (heterogeneous) sets. According to…

Purpose: Semantic learning under 2 co-speech gesture conditions was investigated in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children. Learning was analyzed between conditions. Method: Twenty children with SLI (aged 4 years), 20 TD children matched for age, and 20 TD children matched for language scores were…

Sensory systems are essential for perceiving and conceptualizing our semantic knowledge about the world and the way we interact with it. Despite studies reporting neural changes to compensate for the absence of a given sensory modality, studies focusing on the assessment of semantic processing reveal poor performances by deaf individuals when…

This research study uses geographic information retrieval (GIR) to georeference toponyms and points-of-interest (POI) names from a travel journal. Travel journals are an ideal data source with which to conduct this study because they are significant accounts specific to the author's experience, and contain geographic instances based on the…

Recent semantic space models learn vector representations for word meanings by observing statistical redundancies across a text corpus. A word's meaning is represented as a point in a high-dimensional semantic space, and semantic similarity between words is quantified by a function of their spatial proximity (typically the cosine of the angle…

This study aims to establish whether the processing of different connectives (e.g., "and," "but") and different coherence relations (addition, contrast) can be modulated by a structural feature of the connected segments--namely, parallelism. While "but" is mainly used to contrast two expressions, "and"…

Purpose: The current study takes a practical and theoretically grounded look at assessment of morphological knowledge and its potential to deepen understanding of how morphological knowledge supports reading comprehension for students with limited reading vocabulary. Specifically, we explore how different morphological skills support reading…

Introduction: Baddeley's model of working memory establishes the basis for identifying components that intervene in immediate repetition verbal tasks. Based on this model, the overall aim of the present study was to analyze the relationship between auditory sequential memory and verbal memory in students with intellectual disabilities and thereby…

The cross-categorical use of nouns and verbs poses a challenging problem to young language learners because they are known to be less willing to accept that a single form of a word be used for more than one linguistic purpose (e.g., one-form/one-function principle). The present study investigated whether children under 3 years of age are able to…

In this study, 92 Iranian intermediate EFL learners (17 to 22 years) took part in 14 sessions in which they were taught L2 vocabulary through three input enhancements, i.e., visual input enhancement, semantic input enhancement, and input flooding. In fact, the selected participants were divided into three experimental groups and one control group.…

Students are expected to comprehend and produce increasingly complex texts in upper elementary school, and academic language and literacy skills are considered critical to meeting these expectations. Notions of academic language are also controversial and require careful deliberation when applied to traditionally minoritized populations, including…

Pakistani English is a variety of English language concerning Sentence structure, Morphology, Phonology, Spelling, and Vocabulary. The one semantic element, which makes the investigation of Pakistani English additionally fascinating is the Vocabulary. Pakistani English uses many loan words from Urdu language and other local dialects, which have…