In the REAP system, users are automatically provided with texts to read targeted to their individual reading levels. To find appropriate texts, the user’s vocabulary knowledge must be assessed. We describe an approach to automatically generating questions for vocabulary assessment. Traditionally, these assessments have been hand-written. Using data from WordNet, we generate 6 types of vocabular...

OBJECTIVE Permanent hearing impairment has a life-long impact on children and its early identification is important for language development. A newborn hearing screening (NHS) program has started in Okayama Prefecture, Japan, in 1999 to detect hearing impairment immediately after birth. We aim to examine the effect of this screening program on vocabulary development in pre-school children in a ...

PURPOSE This preliminary investigation was a longitudinal study of fast mapping skills in normally developing children, 16-18 months of age. The purpose was to examine the effects of practice on the accessibility of words in lexical memory. METHOD Eight children were taught the names of 24 unfamiliar objects over 12 weekly training sessions. The amount of practice children had with individual...

The pace at which new words are acquired is influenced by the degree of engagement with them on the part of the learner. Insights from Cognitive Linguistics into the non-arbitrary aspects of vocabulary can be turned into stimuli for such engagement. The majority of Cognitive Linguists‟ proposals for vocabulary teaching aim at helping learners appreciate the way a single word form can develop di...

Many textbooks include semantically related words and sometimes teachers add synonyms, antonyms, etc. to the words in order to present new vocabulary items without questioning the possible effects. This study sought to investigate the effect of teaching vocabulary through synonym, semantically unrelated, and hyponym sets based on Higa’s (1963) proposed continuum. A total of 120 Iranian intermed...

This article examines the effects of synonymy (i.e., learning words with and without high-frequency synonyms that were known to the learners) on word knowledge in a study of 84 Japanese students learning English. It employed 10 tests measuring 5 aspects of word knowledge (orthography, paradigmatic association, syntagmatic association, meaning and form, and grammatical functions) to assess learn...

The importance of vocabulary learning has been underlined in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) because non-English majors who require reading English texts in their fields of study have to expand their English vocabulary knowledge much more efficiently than ordinary ESL/EFL learners. Since academic vocabulary instruction in Iranian universities is realized through the use of Gene...