Top-down restoration mechanisms can enhance perception of degraded speech. Even in normal hearing, however, a large variability has been observed in how effectively individuals can benefit from these mechanisms. To investigate if this variability is partially caused by individuals' linguistic and cognitive skills, normal-hearing participants of varying ages were assessed for receptive vocabular...

This research examined the effects of planning and executive functions on young children's (ages 3-to 5-years) strategies in changing scripts. Young children (N = 77) performed a script task (doll task), three executive function tasks (DCCS, red/blue task, and nine box task), a planning task, and a receptive vocabulary task. In the doll task, young children first enacted a "changing clothes" sc...

Infants preferentially discriminate between speech tokens that cross native category boundaries prior to acquiring a large receptive vocabulary, implying a major role for unsupervised distributional learning strategies in phoneme acquisition in the first year of life. Multiple sources of between-speaker variability contribute to children's language input and thus complicate the problem of distr...

This study examines vocabulary growth in two dimensions, receptive and controlled productive, and the interrelationship between these dimensions. The study focuses on the 2000, 3000, 5000 and academic word list levels. Data were collected from 41 high school students in China. The participants completed a pre-test in the third week of the first semester, and a post-test ten weeks later. The fin...

The purpose of the present study was to provide empirical support for the construct of the involvement load hypothesis (ILH ) in an EFL context. To fulfill the purpose of the study, 4 intact groups consisting of 126 intermediate-level students participated in this experiment. In order to ensure that the participants were at the same level of English language proficiency, the Nelson test was adm...

Deficiencies in mathematics skill constrain students' educational achievement and subsequently, their employment outcomes. This study included 265 school-identified students with mild intellectual disabilities. The research questions investigated the extent to which phonological awareness, color naming speed, and vocabulary knowledge, was related to mathematics skill after controlling for grade...

To investigate the effects of different glossing conventions on vocabulary recognition and recall, 158 participants were given a pre-test to make sure that they did not have any prior knowledge of the target words. Reading passages with four different glossing conventions (interlinear, marginal, pre-text, and post-text) were given to eight groups. Four groups received interlingual glosses and f...

It is well established that extensive reading promotes the incidental learning of L1 and L2 receptive vocabulary; however, little is known about its effectiveness on productive gains in vocabulary knowledge. This paper investigates the extent to which extensive reading combined with writing tasks promotes productive vocabulary growth of Japanese university students. To examine changes in vocabu...

Classic approaches to word learning emphasize referential ambiguity: In naming situations, a novel word could refer to many possible objects, properties, actions, and so forth. To solve this, researchers have posited constraints, and inference strategies, but assume that determining the referent of a novel word is isomorphic to learning. We present an alternative in which referent selection is ...