Two studies involving 274 Air Force recruits and 163 college students, respectively, investigated the relationship between priming effects and declarative knowledge acquisition within repetitive practice models. Individual differences in repetition-priming effects uniquely predicted learning differences relative to other cognitive measures.…

Treats, in a systematic and principled manner, representations studied in situated literacy and an associated methodological approach based on semantic analysis that characterizes the representations. Illustrates application of the method for four situated-literacy examples: mother/child word-naming games; children's story writing; journalistic…

Examines kanji errors in handwriting of Japanese students and Australian learners of Japanese. Finds that Japanese students' phonologically-related kanji writing errors were most numerous, followed by orthographically-related errors and semantically-related errors; while Australian students wrote more non-existing kanji and made…

Explores problems in information sharing; discusses the concept of metadata; illustrates its use on the World Wide Web, as well as other related approaches; and presents an approach to information sharing that uses a semantic modeling language (referent model language) as the basis for expressing semantics of information and designing metadata…

Presents the ALEXIA system, a lexical-learning environment for French as a second or foreign language, and describes its network module, which can automatically build graphs of certain lexical semantic relations. (Author/VWL)

Studies effects of an instructional program for deriving word meanings from context and through morphological analysis for primary school students with poor-to-average reading comprehension. Shows that it has a significant effect on the ability of students to derive word meanings, but found little evidence of transfer to general reading…

Examines the composition of the early productive vocabulary of eight Korean and eight English-learning children and the morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input and early lexical development. (Author/VWL)

Provides an historical sketch of form-focused instruction research, defines what is meant by form-focused instruction, and discusses the main research methods that have been used to investigate form-focused instruction in terms of a broad distinction between confirmatory and interpretive research. (Author/VWL)

Proposes a new system of analysis of English-for-Science-and-Technology data. The article reanalyzes data from previous grammatical-rhetorical interpretations and proposes that each grammatical tense/aspect form in English, including the passive, can be reduced to a semantic core that may be combined with one of several types into which predicate…

Examines how young children describe reversals of action that restore objects to a prior, less-constrained, state. In both English and German, children first rely on the verb "open"; they then use their knowledge of particle pairs. Reentry into a prior state is underlined by uses of "back" and "wieder" and the…

Combines analyses of communication strategies (CS) to deal with an interactional perspective and a psycholinguistic approach. The article uses this combination to provide a clearer picture of CS in relation to foreign-language discourse and proficiency. (22 references) (Author/CK)

Presents abstracts of a session that discussed cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) on the World Wide Web. Topics include CLIR research in Chinese-English, German-English, and Japanese-English involving machine translation, semantic indexing, domain concepts, integrating new technologies, large-scale multilingual lexicons, and international…

Investigates whether Spanish- and Turkish-speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a picture judgment task show that second language learners do discover these properties and that overall verbs appear to cluster in…

Examined how skilled adult readers assign meaning to sentences. Of particular interest were sentences containing "experiencer" verbs, which describe states or emotions rather than actions. Subjects were university students in Australia. Test items were semantically implausible sentences. (Author/VWL)

Outlines a psycholinguistic model of vocabulary acquisition in a second language in an instructional setting. The model is based on an understanding of the representational characteristics of the second language lexicon. (Author/VWL)