This study extends the findings of Gaustad, Kelly, Payne, and Lylak (2002), which showed that deaf college students and hearing middle school students appeared to have approximately the same morphological knowledge and word segmentation skills. Because the average grade level reading abilities for the two groups of students were also similar,…

In order to better understand the neuropsychological underpinnings of the relative strength in word identification in individuals with Down syndrome, the performance of children and adolescents with Down syndrome (N=29) was compared to the performance of a nonverbal-IQ matched group of children and adolescents with developmental disabilities of…

Background: Children who have poor vocabulary knowledge are at risk of wider language weaknesses and reading comprehension difficulties, which will impact upon their educational achievement. The central question addressed in this paper is how best to teach new vocabulary items to these children. Aims: To investigate the effects of two different…

A study examined teaching methods for vocabulary at the first grade level. The study compared teaching vocabulary in context and teaching vocabulary in isolation. Subjects were 32 culturally diverse first-grade students from varying socio-economic backgrounds. The sample consisted of 14 boys and 18 girls, heterogeneously grouped. Two teacher-made…

Studies the effectiveness of weekly vocabulary studies on students' proficiency in using contextual analysis and students' attitudes toward words and word learning. Finds that students made a significantly greater improvement in their ability to use contextual analysis than did students in a comparison group. Notes a slight increase in student…

A study examined the effectiveness of teaching students the vocabulary of mathematics. Subjects in the experimental group, 14 students in a remedial math section of a secondary school basic skills program, were taught the vocabulary and definitions of 50 mathematical terms as identified on the New Jersey High School Proficiency Test, Mathematics.…

To determine why ninth grade students taking the "Minimum Basic Skills Test" (MBST) and the "California Achievement Test" (CAT) performed differently in relation to reading achievement, a study investigated whether the noted discrepencies in reading achievement on the tests were due to differences in vocabulary and…

Using the counting features in previous mean length of utterance (MLU) studies, a study of the active vocabularies of adolescents looked at seven concrete features of the words 104 seventh grade and 100 eleventh grade subjects gave in response to 10 pictures. Each subject wrote five words for each of the pictures, which were analyzed for number of…

Children's communication performance improves with age, which could result from increases in children's vocabularies, changes in their strategies of selecting messages from their vocabularies, or both. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate these explanations. Two types of communication tasks were employed. These data suggest younger…

Reliability and validity of "Degrees of Reading Power" test and "Iowa Tests of Basic Skills" reading comprehension and vocabulary tests were compared. Test scores, grades, and assigned reading levels of 191 fifth and sixth graders and 186 sixth and seventh graders in an eastern Iowa school district were used. Reliability and…

Scholastic Aptitude Test verbal, reading comprehension, and vocabulary scores are similar to the Nelson-Denny total, reading comprehension, and vocabulary scores. Correlation coefficients developed from these comparisons, when viewed as validity coefficients, are moderately high. (Author)

Explored differences in the social and cognitive development of 4-year-olds in junior kindergarten taught by differentially educated instructors. Found that children taught by early childhood educators with 2-year college degrees in early childhood education and those taught by teachers with a university teaching certificate did not differ in…

This study probed whether or not a distinctive Down syndrome (DS) pattern could be found in the realm of vocabulary comprehension. Groups of 29 each of DS adolescents, non-DS mentally retarded (MR) adolescents, and nonretarded children were statistically matched on receptive vocabulary ability; DS and MR groups were also matched for chronological…

A study examined the efficacy of the keyword method of vocabulary instruction by comparing it with five methods designed to increase semantic processing of the definitions of the vocabulary words. Subjects in all five experiments were college students. In the first three experiments, recall of the definitions from the vocabulary words was the…