Examined individual growth rates in definitional skill over a period of 3 to 6 years, for 68 low-income children. Results of the study support the notion that definitional skill is related to being part of an academic culture; low-income mothers, whose formal schooling is complete, generally do not give oral definitions to simple nouns as well as…

Investigated Russian children's color-term acquisition, testing one theory of color universals using acquisition order as a basicness measure and determining whether two terms for blue were genuinely basic. Testing on color-term listing, production, and comprehension indicated that color-term acquisition order agreed with the theory. The two blue…

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…

Describes an interdisciplinary art activity that aims to improve students' mathematics vocabularies and their drawing and computer skills. Focuses on the painting style of Stuart Davis, whose artworks included words. Students create their artworks using the Painting Document of ClarisWorks. (CMK)

Examined differences in children's spontaneous use of emotion vocabulary during peer interactions and explored these differences in relation to children's likability as assessed by peers. Found that with increasing age, emotion vocabulary became more differentiated and complex, and children who used a larger number of emotion words were more liked…

Focuses on the errors made in lexical verb choice in speech by a small group of advanced learners of English. Findings indicate that while these learners may have a broad outline of verb meaning, their knowledge is hazy concerning contextual and collocational restrictions. Advanced learners may require detailed classroom vocabulary work on simple…

Proposes an alternative account of the child's learning of nouns and adjectives that relies on properties of the semantic categories to be learned and of the word-learning task itself. In five experiments, a simple connectionist network was trained to label input objects in particular contexts; the network learned categories resembling nouns…

Examines five factors that may impact the use of second language emotion vocabulary. Considers the impact of language proficiency, gender, and extroversion on the use of emotion words in the advanced French interlanguage of 29 native Dutch speakers, and examines influence of sociocultural competence, gender, and type of linguistic material on use…

Examined how reading texts for different purposes affected amounts of incidental word learning. Grade 6 students were asked to read texts for fun, to learn about the topic of the text, and for text comprehension. Level of reading ability was a significant factor in all conditions. Low ability readers learned hardly any words incidentally;…

Discusses how second-language reading research is focusing increasingly on the cognitive processes involved in reading--the interaction of lower-level, bottom-up processes such as vocabulary acquisition with high-level, top-down processes such as activating prior knowledge. This knowledge is combined with current research on learning with…

Presents a case study that tests a mathematical model for its ability to predict second language vocabulary gains achieved through reading. To overcome the problem of small word gains noted in earlier studies of incidental acquisition, an adult learner of Dutch read a lengthy text and was tested on hundreds of words. The participant's gains were…

Examines the relative contribution of phonological short term memory (STM) to vocabulary acquisition in 5-year-old children. The results show that work span, rhyme detection and nonword repetition predict concurrent vocabulary level at age 5. When the study was repeated with same subjects one year later, span and rhyme detection again predicted…

Examined why adults learning second languages make frequent errors in lexical form. More and less fluent bilinguals in English and Spanish performed a translation recognition task in which they had to decide whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. Less fluent participants experienced more interference for…

Considers what the research literature suggests about the kinds of texts and kinds of talk that are most beneficial for read-aloud experiences. Provides an overview of Text Talk, an approach to read-alouds directed toward enhancing young children's ability to construct meaning. Includes examples of teacher/student interaction and suggests aspects…

American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) students are often labeled as struggling readers based on the results of large-scale standardized tests yet little empirical data about specific strengths and needs exists. In the present study we looked beyond high-stakes assessment to highlight reading strengths and needs for a group of fourth grade American…