Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

School success in the 21st century requires proficiency with expository discourse--the use and understanding of informative language in spoken and written modalities. This occurs, for example, when high school students read their textbooks and listen to their teachers' lectures, and later are asked to demonstrate their knowledge of this complex…

Describes an experiment whose principal aim was to examine how a classroom silent period, devoted almost exclusively to aural comprehension, operates. In the case of the French adult learners of English involved in this study, 60 hours proved to be a satisfactory period. (SED)

This paper concerns the influence of age of acquisition (AoA) in word reading and other tasks, and attempts to develop a number of issues raised by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002). Analyses performed on both rated and objective measures of AoA show that the frequency trajectory of words is a reliable predictor of their order of acquisition, which…