Acquisition Of Word Meanings Research Articles

EFL Student-Teachers’ Perception Toward Teaching English Vocabulary Through Poetry

Poetry has been reported to promote language awareness and authentic learning sources. As poems are composed in carefully arranged words to form rhyming sounds with beautiful rhythm, the present study aimed to reveal EFL students' perceptions of using poetry to teach English vocabulary. Conducted qualitatively, the present observed eighty-seven short essays on using English poems for improving students' vocabulary written by student-teachers from an English Language Education Department in Bali. It was revealed that the student-teachers perceived poetry to help improve students' acquisition of word form, use, and meaning. Forty-four students wrote poems that could improve students' understanding of English word forms: twenty-three students argued that poetry could improve students' pronunciation. Twenty-one participants believed poems could improve students' spelling. In terms of word meaning, a total of thirty vouched for the use of poetry for introducing figurative languages (twenty-three students), enhancing students' acquisition of colloquial vocabulary (eleven students), and familiarizing students with unfamiliar words (eleven participants). A total of nine students insisted that poems could be used to improve students' word use, whereas six students believed poems could display grammatical functions. At the same time, three participants recognize the use of poems for acquainting students with collocations. These results imply that future EFL teachers recognize the potential of bringing English poetry as a medium for improving their EFL students'' vocabulary, hinting at the need for further research on the systematic procedure of how to implement poetry into EFL classrooms.

Metaphor as a cognitive facilitator in L2 vocabulary acquisition

Vocabulary acquisition is a cognitive activity that poses a significant challenge to second language learners. Non-literal language, particularly metaphor, has long been recognized as a potent cognitive and linguistic tool for expressing and understanding abstract concepts, emotions, and experiences. However, some contend that learning non-literal language may impede L2 vocabulary acquisition. This research paper aimed to investigate the impact of metaphorical competence and metaphorical awareness on vocabulary acquisition in second language learners based on theoretical and empirical studies. It examined a few studies that demonstrated how metaphorical competence and awareness facilitate vocabulary acquisition, such as scaffolding learners’ acquisition of word meanings and improving their vocabulary retention. The implications for L2 vocabulary research were discussed for future design, and pedagogical implications were proffered for educators.

The Relative Effectiveness of Gap Filling, Summary Writing and Sentence Making in EFL Vocabulary Acquisition

This study investigates whether reading task type affects English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ vocabulary acquisition or not. 68 EFL learners are divided into three groups at random, assigned to one of three reading tasks of learning 15 target words of meaning and part of speech. The tasks are designed based on the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH), which induces need (N), search (S), and evaluation (E) as components of involvement. The three tasks involve the same or different components: gap filling (+N, -S, +E), summary writing (+N, -S, +E) and sentence making (+N, -S, ++E). The findings are summarized as follows: the higher involvement loads a reading task induces, the more word meaning and part-of-speech knowledge EFL learners can acquire; the effects of tasks with equal involvement loads are identical on EFL learners’ acquisition of word meaning and part-of-speech knowledge. The results support the ILH and have some implications for English teaching.

Neural dynamics underlying the processing of implicit form-meaning connections: The dissociative roles of theta and alpha oscillations

Implicit learning plays an important role in the language acquisition. In addition to helping people acquire the form-level rules (e.g., the word order regularities), implicit learning can also facilitate the acquisition of word meanings (i.e., the establishment of connections between the word form and its meanings). Although some behavioral studies have explored the processing of implicit form-meaning connections, the neural dynamics underlying this processing remains unclear. Through examining whether participants could implicitly acquire the literal and metaphorical meanings of novel words, and applying the time-frequency analysis on the electroencephalogram (EEG) data collected in the testing phase, the neural oscillations corresponding to the processing of implicit form-literal and form-metaphorical meaning connections were explored. The results showed that participants in the experimental group could implicitly acquire the form-literal and form-metaphorical meaning connections after training, while participants in the control group who were not trained did not have access to such form-meaning connections. Meanwhile, during the processing of form-literal meaning connections, the greater suppression of alpha oscillations was induced by the testing items that follow the same rules as the training items (i.e., the regular testing items) in the experimental group, whereas the stronger enhancement of theta oscillations was elicited by the regular testing items in the experimental group during the processing of form-metaphorical meaning connections. Our study provides insights for understanding the processing of implicit form-literal and form-metaphorical meaning connections and the neural dynamics underlying the processing.

A brief review of the effects of image schema theory on the acquisition of polysemy

Cognitive linguistics can inspire language pedagogy. As one of the core conceptions of cognitive linguistics, image schema theory can be integrated into foreign/second language teaching to facilitate learners’ acquisition of word meanings, especially those polysemous words which have long been difficult points for both learners and instructors. This research conducts a thorough review of the image schema theory and polysemy in cognitive linguistics and discusses the feasibility, and potential benefits of the teaching method based on image schema theory. Also, this research synthesizes the previous empirical studies about the effects of image schema theory on the acquisition of polysemy. It is found that the effectiveness of image-schema-based instruction has been generally recognized; however, the inconsistencies in the previous studies necessitate further exploration. Also, future studies can pay more attention to the effects of image schema theory on the acquisition of polysemous verbs.

Acquisition of novel word meaning via cross situational word learning: An event-related potential study

Cross-situational statistical word learning (CSWL) refers to the process whereby participants learn new words by tracking ambiguous word-object co-occurrences across time. This study used event-related potentials to explore the acquisition of novel word meanings via CSWL in healthy adults. After learning to associate novel auditory words (e.g., ‘ket’) with familiar objects (e.g., sword), participants performed a semantic judgement task where the learned novel words were paired with a familiar word belonging to either the same (e.g., dagger) or a different (e.g., harp) semantic category. As a comparison, the task also included word pairs comprising two familiar words. The analyses revealed that the unrelated novel word pairs elicited a similar N400 to that of the unrelated familiar word pairs, but with a different hemispheric distribution (left hemisphere for novel words, right hemisphere for familiar words). These findings demonstrate rapid meaning acquisition via CSWL, which is reflected at a neurophysiological level.

L1 어휘 의미 습득과정 연구에 대한 비판적 고찰

The purpose of this study is to critically review and study L1 child acquisition of word meaning in terms of the theory of mind with respect to different age groups, based on Bloom (2000). Two more current papers were studied in line with Chenu & Jisa (2009) and Kuipers et al. (2017) to identify and clarify the important issues raised in the field of vocabulary acquisition or vocabulary learning. Bloom

Word Meaning, Androcentrism, and Language Acquisition (Based on a survey of English proverbs)

In our days second language acquisition is not just an option but rather a necessity, particularly, when it is about English which is a global lingua franca. It is a permanent process involving consideration both of constantly updating methods and techniques and novel approaches to various aspects of language. Given the intensified discussions of the androcentric nature of some aspects of English and of the so called he/man approach, I decided to check whether and how similar phenomena may evolve among Georgian learners of English. For the sake of this goal, I conducted the following survey. The object of the survey was the dual meaning of the word man in English proverbs. The word referred either to “a male person” or “a person in general.” The survey was conducted in a group of 10 students. The students got a survey file while being on the online meeting. The language of the meeting was English. After having read all the proverbs, the students were to write “a male person” or “a person in general” at the end of each proverb. If they were unable to distinguish between the meanings, they could write “I cannot guess.” The paper presents the results of the survey with an emphasis on the students’ capability of distinguishing between generic and masculine meanings of the word in question and on related linguistic and didactic implications.

Word Meaning, Androcentrism, and Language Acquisition (Based on a survey of English proverbs)

In our days second language acquisition is not just an option but rather a necessity, particularly, when it is about English which is a global lingua franca. It is a permanent process involving consideration both of constantly updating methods and techniques and novel approaches to various aspects of language. Given the intensified discussions of the androcentric nature of some aspects of English and of the so called he/man approach, I decided to check whether and how similar phenomena may evolve among Georgian learners of English. For the sake of this goal, I conducted the following survey. The object of the survey was the dual meaning of the word man in English proverbs. The word referred either to “a male person” or “a person in general.” The survey was conducted in a group of 10 students. The students got a survey file while being on the online meeting. The language of the meeting was English. After having read all the proverbs, the students were to write “a male person” or “a person in general” at the end of each proverb. If they were unable to distinguish between the meanings, they could write “I cannot guess.” The paper presents the results of the survey with an emphasis on the students’ capability of distinguishing between generic and masculine meanings of the word in question and on related linguistic and didactic implications

Development of Abstract Word Knowledge.

The development of children’s word knowledge is an important testing ground for the embodied account of word meaning, which proposes that word meanings are grounded in sensorimotor systems. Acquisition of abstract words, in particular, is a noted challenge for strong accounts of embodiment. We examined acquisition of abstract word meanings, using data on development of vocabulary knowledge from early school to University ages. We tested two specific proposals for how abstract words are learned: the affective embodiment account, that emotional experience is key to learning abstract word meanings, and the learning through language proposal, that abstract words are acquired through language experience. We found support for the affective embodiment account: word valence, interoception, and mouth action all facilitated abstract word acquisition more than concrete word acquisition. We tested the learning through language proposal by investigating whether words that appear in more diverse linguistic contexts are earlier acquired. Results showed that contextual diversity facilitated vocabulary acquisition, but did so for both abstract and concrete words. Our results provide evidence that emotion and sensorimotor systems are important to children’s acquisition of abstract words, but there is still considerable variance to be accounted for by other factors. We offer suggestions for future research to examine the acquisition of abstract vocabulary.

Semantic Grounding of Novel Spoken Words in the Primary Visual Cortex

Embodied theories of grounded semantics postulate that, when word meaning is first acquired, a link is established between symbol (word form) and corresponding semantic information present in modality-specific—including primary—sensorimotor cortices of the brain. Direct experimental evidence documenting the emergence of such a link (i.e., showing that presentation of a previously unknown, meaningless word sound induces, after learning, category-specific reactivation of relevant primary sensory or motor brain areas), however, is still missing. Here, we present new neuroimaging results that provide such evidence. We taught participants aspects of the referential meaning of previously unknown, senseless novel spoken words (such as “Shruba” or “Flipe”) by associating them with either a familiar action or a familiar object. After training, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to analyze the participants’ brain responses to the new speech items. We found that hearing the newly learnt object-related word sounds selectively triggered activity in the primary visual cortex, as well as secondary and higher visual areas.These results for the first time directly document the formation of a link between the novel, previously meaningless spoken items and corresponding semantic information in primary sensory areas in a category-specific manner, providing experimental support for perceptual accounts of word-meaning acquisition in the brain.

Lack of neural evidence for implicit language learning in 9-month-old infants at high risk for autism.

Word segmentation is a fundamental aspect of language learning, since identification of word boundaries in continuous speech must occur before the acquisition of word meanings can take place. We previously used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are less sensitive to statistical and speech cues that guide implicit word segmentation. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying this process during infancy and how this may be associated with ASD risk. Here, we examined early neural signatures of language-related learning in 9-month-old infants at high (HR) and low familial risk (LR) for ASD. During natural sleep, infants underwent fMRI while passively listening to three speech streams containing strong statistical and prosodic cues, strong statistical cues only, or minimal statistical cues to word boundaries. Compared to HR infants, LR infants showed greater activity in the left amygdala for the speech stream containing statistical and prosodic cues. While listening to this same speech stream, LR infants also showed more learning-related signal increases in left temporal regions as well as increasing functional connectivity between bilateral primary auditory cortex and right anterior insula. Importantly, learning-related signal increases at 9 months positively correlated with expressive language outcome at 36 months in both groups. In the HR group, greater signal increases were additionally associated with less severe ASD symptomatology at 36 months. These findings suggest that early differences in the neural networks underlying language learning may predict subsequent language development and altered trajectories associated with ASD risk.

Psychological and Electrophysiological Correlates of Word Learning Success

Background. A rich vocabulary supports human achievements in socio-economic activities, education, and communication. It is therefore important to clarify the nature of language acquisition as a complex multidimensional process. However, both the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms underpinning language learning, as well as the links between them, are still poorly understood. Objective. This study aims to explore the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of successful word acquisition in a person’s native language. Design. Thirty adults read sentences with novel nouns, following which the participants’ electroencephalograms were recorded during a word-reading task. Event-related potentials in response to novel words and alpha oscillation parameters (amplitude, variability, and long-range temporal correlation dynamics) were analyzed. Learning outcomes were assessed at the lexical and semantic levels. Psychological variables measured using Amthauer’s test (verbal abilities), BIS/BAS scales (motivation), and the MSTAT-1 (ambiguity tolerance) and alpha oscillation parameters were factored. Results. Better recognition of novel words was related to two factors which had high factor loadings for all measured alpha oscillation parameters, indicating the role of attention networks and respective neural activity for enabling information processing. More successful learners had lower P200 amplitude, which also suggests higher attention-system involvement. Another factor predicted better acquisition of word meanings for less ambiguity-tolerant students, while the factor which pooled logical conceptual thinking ability and persistence in goal-reaching, positively correlated with acquisition of both word forms and meanings. Conclusion. The psychological factors predominantly correlated with word-learning success in semantic tasks, while neurophysiological variables were linked to performance in the recognition task.

Psychological and Electrophysiological Correlates of Word Learning Success.

A rich vocabulary supports human achievements in socio-economic activities, education, and communication. It is therefore important to clarify the nature of language acquisition as a complex multidimensional process. However, both the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms underpinning language learning, as well as the links between them, are still poorly understood. This study aims to explore the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of successful word acquisition in a person's native language. Thirty adults read sentences with novel nouns, following which the participants' electroencephalograms were recorded during a word-reading task. Event- related potentials in response to novel words and alpha oscillation parameters (amplitude, variability, and long-range temporal correlation dynamics) were analyzed. Learning outcomes were assessed at the lexical and semantic levels. Psychological variables measured using Amthauer's test (verbal abilities), BIS/BAS scales (motivation), and the MSTAT-1 (ambiguity tolerance) and alpha oscillation parameters were factored. Better recognition of novel words was related to two factors which had high factor loadings for all measured alpha oscillation parameters, indicating the role of attention networks and respective neural activity for enabling information processing. More successful learners had lower P200 amplitude, which also suggests higher attention-system involvement. Another factor predicted better acquisition of word meanings for less ambiguity-tolerant students, while the factor which pooled logical conceptual thinking ability and persistence in goal-reaching, positively correlated with acquisition of both word forms and meanings. The psychological factors predominantly correlated with word-learning success in semantic tasks, while neurophysiological variables were linked to performance in the recognition task.

Spatial Metaphor Facilitates Word Learning.

Why are spatial metaphors, like the use of "high" to describe a musical pitch, so common? This study tested one hundred and fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old English-learning children on their ability to learn a novel adjective in the domain of space or pitch and to extend this adjective to the untrained dimension. Children were more proficient at learning the word when it described a spatial attribute compared to pitch. However, once children learned the word, they extended it to the untrained dimension without feedback. Thus, children leveraged preexisting associations between space and pitch to spontaneously understand new metaphors. These results suggest that spatial metaphors may be common across languages in part because they scaffold children's acquisition of word meanings that are otherwise difficult to learn.

Examining the Effects of Multitiered Oral Narrative Language Instruction on Reading Comprehension and Writing

This early-stage feasibility study investigated the effects of a multitiered oral narrative language intervention on oral language, reading comprehension, and writing. Twenty-eight second-grade students participated in this quasi-experimental control group study with assignment at the classroom level. The independent variable was large- and small-group oral narrative language intervention that required students to retell increasingly complex stories that were strategically crafted to include academic language typically found in grade-level reading material. Story grammar, causal adverbial subordinate clauses, elaborated noun phrases, adverbs, and the acquisition of word meanings through context were explicitly taught. Students' performance on proximal measures of oral narrative retells, as well as distal measures of reading comprehension and writing, was assessed at pretest and posttest. Statistically significant differences between the treatment and control groups were found on all outcome measures using nonparametric analyses. Large- and small-group multitiered oral narrative instruction improved not only oral narrative language but also reading comprehension and written composition.

Word learning from context in school-age children: relations with language ability and executive function.

Purpose: Although school-age children learn most new word meanings from surrounding context, the joint roles of language ability and executive function (EF) in the word learning process remain unclear. This study examined children's acquisition of word meanings from context in relation to oral language ability and three EF skills (working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility). Method: Typically developing school-age children completed measures of language and EF, then read and listened to short stories containing unfamiliar target words. A multiple-choice pretest-posttest measure assessed children's target word knowledge gains. Results: Regression analyses showed that language and cognitive flexibility were both related to word knowledge gains; each skill assumed greater importance among children with relative weakness in the other skill. Conclusion: Language ability and cognitive flexibility may each play a direct role in contextual word learning among school-age children, with children naturally relying on one skill if the other is weaker.

Visual cortex recruitment during language processing in blind individuals is explained by Hebbian learning

In blind people, the visual cortex takes on higher cognitive functions, including language. Why this functional reorganisation mechanistically emerges at the neuronal circuit level is still unclear. Here, we use a biologically constrained network model implementing features of anatomical structure, neurophysiological function and connectivity of fronto-temporal-occipital areas to simulate word-meaning acquisition in visually deprived and undeprived brains. We observed that, only under visual deprivation, distributed word-related neural circuits ‘grew into’ the deprived visual areas, which therefore adopted a linguistic-semantic role. Three factors are crucial for explaining this deprivation-related growth: changes in the network’s activity balance brought about by the absence of uncorrelated sensory input, the connectivity structure of the network, and Hebbian correlation learning. In addition, the blind model revealed long-lasting spiking neural activity compared to the sighted model during word recognition, which is a neural correlate of enhanced verbal working memory. The present neurocomputational model offers a neurobiological account for neural changes following sensory deprivation, thus closing the gap between cellular-level mechanisms, system-level linguistic and semantic function.

Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children.

Decades of research show that children rely on the linguistic context in which novel words occur to infer their meanings. However, because learning in these studies was assessed after children had heard numerous occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts, it is impossible to determine how much exposure would be needed for a child to learn from such information. This study investigated the speed with which French 20-month-olds and 3-to-4-year-olds exploit function words to determine the syntactic category of novel words and therefore infer their meanings. In a real-time preferential looking task, participants saw two videos side-by-side on a TV-screen: one showing a person performing a novel action, and the other a person passively holding a novel object. At the same time, participants heard only three occurrences of a novel word preceded either by a determiner (e.g., “Regarde! Une dase! – “Look! A dase!”) or a pronoun (e.g., “Regarde! Elle dase!” – “Look! She’s dasing!”). 3-to-4-year-olds exploited function words to categorize novel words and infer their meanings: they looked more to the novel action in the verb condition, while participants in the noun condition looked more to the novel object. 20-month-olds, however, did not show this difference. We discuss possible reasons for why 20-month-olds may have found it difficult to infer novel word meanings in our task. Given that 20-month-olds can use function words to learn word meanings in experiments providing many repetitions, we suspect that more repetitions might be needed to observe positive effects of learning in this age range in our task. Our study establishes nevertheless that before age 4, young children become able to exploit function words to infer the meanings of unknown words as soon as they occur. This ability to interpret speech in real-time and build interpretations about novel word meanings might be extremely useful for young children to map words to their possible referents and to boost their acquisition of word meanings.

Prosody and Function Words Cue the Acquisition of Word Meanings in 18-Month-Old Infants

Language acquisition presents a formidable task for infants, for whom word learning is a crucial yet challenging step. Syntax (the rules for combining words into sentences) has been robustly shown to be a cue to word meaning. But how can infants access syntactic information when they are still acquiring the meanings of words? We investigated the contribution of two cues that may help infants break into the syntax and give a boost to their lexical acquisition: phrasal prosody (speech melody) and function words, both of which are accessible early in life and correlate with syntactic structure in the world’s languages. We show that 18-month-old infants use prosody and function words to recover sentences’ syntactic structure, which in turn constrains the possible meanings of novel words: Participants (N = 48 in each of two experiments) interpreted a novel word as referring to either an object or an action, given its position within the prosodic-syntactic structure of sentences.