Children vary greatly in their vocabulary development during preschool years. Importantly, the pace of this early vocabulary growth predicts vocabulary size at school entrance. Despite its importance for later academic success, not much is known about the relation between individual differences in early vocabulary development and later brain structure and function. Here we examined the associat...

This study investigated whether it is possible to provide naturalistic second language acquisition (SLA) of vocabulary for young learners in a classroom situation without resorting to a classical immersion approach. Participants were 60 first-grade pupils in two Norwegian elementary schools in their first year. The control group followed regular instruction as prescribed by the school curriculu...

Two main features of vocabulary knowledge, namely breadth and depth, have a fundamental role in vocabulary research. This research aimed to study the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, and to investigate which feature of vocabulary knowledge, breadth or depth, had better impact on identifying reading comprehension performance. Therefore, three language tests we...

this study has examined the effect of semantic mapping on learning vocabulary across genders. the researchers selected 120 intermediate students after the administration of a standard proficiency test. a vocabulary test was also used to measure the students’ vocabulary knowledge. the experimental group received semantic mapping in the pre-reading stage, butthe control group did not receive this...

We propose a method to construct a phrase class n-gram model for Kana-Kanji Conversion by combining phrase and class methods. We use a word-pronunciation pair as the basic prediction unit of the language model. We compared the conversion accuracy and model size of a phrase class bi-gram model constructed by our method to a tri-gram model. The conversion accuracy was measured by F measure and mo...

Structural analyses of developing lexicons have provided evidence for both children's holistic lexical representations and sensitivity to phonetic segments. In the present investigation, neighbourhood analyses of two children's (age 3;6) expressive lexicons, maternal input, and an adult lexicon were conducted. In addition to raw counts and frequency-weighted counts, neighbourhood size was calcu...