Concludes that a significantly higher proportion of a word was needed by all adult ESL students to identify low-frequency words than high-frequency words, and a significant difference existed in the proportion of a word needed by all subjects for identification in poor, moderate, and rich contexts. (FL)

Describes the Adult Basic Word List, a resource that can be used by illiterate adult learners for a quick spelling reference as well as by teachers and other curriculum developers for lesson and material design. (HOD)

Most modern language teachers consider commercial films prepared for native speakers of the target language useful as a teaching device only for advanced students. The results of an analysis of the vocabulary content of "High Tide at Noon" seem to indicate that any student with a basic English vocabulary could follow the script. (CFM)

A statistical study of 100,000 words from medical English literature to determine the core lexis of medicine across specialties is reported. It is suggested that both the research procedure and the results are applicable to instruction in reading medical English for professional purposes. (MSE)

Language is viewed as a nonhomogeneous hierarchical system, where complex correlations between a psychological/social dimension (external) and a linguistic dimension (internal) permit measurements of the stability and acceptability of its structures. Frequency of occurrence and integration in the system are presented as the key factors in the…

Demonstrates that the contextual probability of lexical items in a continuous sample of spontaneous speech, as measured by the predictability of words in context, is related to word frequency. (Author/RL)

Describes an empirical study that measured word-profile similarities between citing and cited publications in the chemical engineering field. Highlights include cognitive resemblance and bibliographic coupling; data collection techniques; analysis of word-profile similarity; bibliographic coupled publications; mapping of cognitive resemblance; and…

Three experiments used the differential frequency effect as a diagnostic tool to investigate the mental representation of disyllabic compound words in Mandarin Chinese. The results indicated that, when both word frequency and morpheme frequency were held constant, high-frequency first syllables slowed responses to real words. (41 references) (MDM)

The use of computer software to teach grammatical constructions faster by developing good linguistic "reflexes" is described. The program has three levels: choice of gender determiner; impact of the initial letter of the word on the determiner's form; and placement of adjectives. The program also provides reinforcement for speed of…

Describes the development and evaluation of a new academic word list that was completed from a corpus of 3.5 million running words of written academic text by examining the range and frequency of words outside the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words in English. Explains the problems with existing word lists intended to guide materials…

Investigated the number of times a word must be encountered in order to be learned and the types of contexts that are conducive to learning in a vocabulary acquisition study with Quebec school-aged English-as-a-Second-Language learners at five levels of proficiency. Learners read text and were tested on new vocabulary and learned and unlearned…

Balota et al. [Balota, D., Cortese, M., Sergent-Marshall, S., Spieler, D., & Yap, M. (2004). Visual word recognition for single-syllable words. "Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133," 283-316] studied lexical processing in word naming and lexical decision using hierarchical multiple regression techniques for a large data set of…

Reading has been an extensively studied topic in the Western hemisphere for several decades, and an enormous amount of empirical data has accumulated on various aspects of reading alphabetic writing systems like English. Of late, there has been some interest in the processing of non-alphabetic scripts. However, there is hardly any empirical…