Ways are discussed in which foreign words are stored in learners' mental lexicons. Then several activities and exercises, which aim at improving learners' receptive and productive vocabulary skills, are presented. (42 references) (LB)

A study examined whether children increased their vocabularies as a result of hearing unfamiliar words within the oral context of a story and observed the oral strategies the children employed as they attempted to define a new word. Subjects, 64 males and 64 females, were from self-contained third-grade classrooms in public schools in a small town…

Details two experiments that assessed the effect of vocabulary difficulty on three measures of text comprehension--free recall, summary recall, and sentence recognition. (FL)

People of ages 4, 6, 8, 10, 20 and 70 years named pictures selected to represent the entire range of lexical consensus among 20-year-olds. Consensus within each group increased with age, up to 20. Data indicate words coding culturally important events are acquired earliest. (CHK)

Focuses on the examination of pupil responses for grades two through four in a study that provides more recent information about the performance of pupils on the Dolch Test. Provides some observations to assist teachers in interpreting the result of pupil responses to these words. (MG)

This study illustrates a procedure for analyzing a single subject's variability of response times in a simple, timed lexical task. It examined the extent to which second language English word recognition in this subject was subserved by automatic as opposed to controlled processes. (33 references) (MDM)

Notes that in the trend toward literature-based reading programs, teaching other important aspects of reading and language is often neglected. Discusses how teaching about words themselves, and the rhythms, sounds, spellings, combinations and shapes that make them, can enhance reading programs because they increase children's word knowledge,…

The Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind (WLG) theory of the neurobiological basis of language is of great historical importance, and it continues to exert a substantial influence on most contemporary theories of language in spite of its widely recognized limitations. Here, we suggest that neurobiologically grounded computational models based on the WLG…

Two investigations of the acquisition of the meaning of "always" and "never," and "always,""never,""usually,""seldom," and "sometimes" are discussed. Results demonstrate that the acquisition sequence of meanings of related words may vary among children at the beginning, but become consistent in later acquisition. (CHK)

Three investigations of preschool children's comprehension of "younger" and "older" are discussed. Results suggest children focus on height in their initial hypotheses about meanings of the terms, ignoring age or function cues. These and findings about acquisition of antonyms are discussed in terms of recent theorizing about lexical-meaning…

Presents a study designed to measure to what extent secondary school students' ability to guess the meanings of words in isolation is related to guessing words in context. Finds similarities between strategies used in isolated and contextual situations, but the students also made effective use of context. (MG)