In this paper, we distinguish between two ways that an individual can construct a formal proof. We define a syntactic proof production to occur when the prover draws inferences by manipulating symbolic formulae in a logically permissible way. We define a semantic proof production to occur when the prover uses instantiations of mathematical…

Two experiments involving Chinese 2nd graders and 4th graders investigated the use of subcharacter information to learn to pronounce unfamiliar semantic-phonetic compound characters. Experiment 1 confirmed that children can use the information in both tone-different and onset-different characters to learn character pronunciations and showed that…

"Bildung" is a key concept in the German tradition of educational theory. Originally meant to indicate a specific state of mind and ideal of perfection, it now serves as a symbol of the unity of whatever refers to the field of education, particularly to its organisational and functional aspects. The aura of "Bildung" is bestowed on its counterpart…

This paper explores how the three concepts of vision, metaphor, and fantasy serve educational research for a better understanding of teachers' minds regarding educational issues. Drawing upon data based on a review of the literature, the following has been found: a semantic comparison showed that the concepts were similar in their abilities to…

Four experiments are reported to study lexical access in picture naming. Interference was found when semantically related word primes were presented, but no effect was obtained using picture primes (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2a, 2b and 3, we introduced a new technique: Double-priming. The technique requires naming a picture target after…

Central questions in psycholinguistic studies on bilingualism are how bilinguals access words in their two languages, and how they control their language systems and solve the problem of cross-language competition. In their excellent paper "The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision", Dijkstra and…

In noun compounds in English, the modifying noun may be singular ("mouse-eater") or an irregularly inflected plural ("mice-eater"), but regularly inflected plurals are dispreferred (*"rats-eater"). This phenomenon has been taken as strong evidence for dual-mechanism theories of lexical representations, which hold that regular (rule-governed) and…

Five experiments investigated the recognition of proper names and common nouns using the lexical decision paradigm. In Experiments 1-3 the case of the initial letter of written stimuli was systematically varied. An advantage was consistently found for proper names written with the first letter in capital. Crucially, response times to proper names…

This paper addresses the problem of learning the class of raising verbs (e.g. seem). These verbs are potentially problematic for learners in that unlike typical main verbs, these verbs do not stand in a semantic relation with any Noun Phrase (NP) arguments. Moreover, a second class of verbs, known as control verbs, shares certain distributional…

The origin and functions of the hand and arm gestures that accompany speech production are poorly understood. It has been proposed that gestures facilitate lexical retrieval, but little is known about when retrieval is accompanied by gestural activity and how this activity is related to the semantics of the word to be retrieved. Electromyographic…

Children tend to choose an entity they cannot already label, rather than one they can, as the likely referent of a novel noun. The effect of input that contradicts this strategy on the interpretation of other novel nouns was investigated. In pre- and posttests, 4-year-olds were asked to judge whether novel nouns referred to…

The paper reviewed studies in word-level processing skills and related areas, and profiled how the development of L2 word recognition and integration skills would contribute to autonomous "kango" (Chinese originated words or words created from Chinese originated words) vocabulary learning. Despite the fact that the acquisition of a…

The perceived crisis in reading achievement may be misplaced--the real crisis may be what is ignored in the curriculum. People are alarmed at the lack of emphasis being placed on teaching content knowledge in many of today's classrooms. They laugh when Jay Leno takes to the street, interviewing teenagers and young adults who do not have the…

This study compared the uses of emotion vocabulary in narratives elicited from monolingual speakers of Russian and English and advanced American learners of Russian. Monolingual speakers differed significantly in the distribution of emotion terms across morphosyntactic categories: English speakers favored an adjectival pattern of emotion…

Spanish-speaking (SS) children with language impairment (LI) present with deficits in morphology and verb argument structure. These language areas may be useful for clinical identification of affected children. This study aimed to evaluate the discrimination accuracy of spontaneous language measures with SS preschoolers to tease out what…