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...

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 ...

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...

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 current study investigated the effects of L1 and L2 glosses on L2 vocabulary retention in incidental and intentional settings. To this end, 100 intermediate Iranian female learners of English as a foreign language at Soroosh High School were given a pre-test to make sure that they do not have any prior knowledge of the target words. Reading passages with three different glossing conditions ...

the present study is an attempt to contribute to the l2 acquisition research through finding an appropriate answer to the question usually asked by both language teachers and learners, namely how to learn vocabulary and how to retain meanings in memory over time. we have chosen to discover the effects of two major types of productive exercises, writing and oral production exercises, on the reme...

In this paper, we explore Productive Pedagogy (PP) as a framework for enhancing teacher education. Reporting results from a study involving student teachers’ application of the four principles of PP during an internship, we consider whether PP brings a firmer knowledge base to their work. Based on our analysis of the data, we argue for a more fundamental reorganisation of teacher education to f...

For the last twenty years, many researchers interested in language acquisition have quantified the receptive and productive vocabulary of infants using CDIs – checklists of words filled in by the caregiver. While it is generally accepted that the caregiver can reliably say whether the infant knows and/or produces a given word, we lack an estimate for words that are not listed on CDI. In this st...