Contextual diversity favors the learning of new words in children regardless of their comprehension skills

When is a word in good company for learning?

Although identifying the referents of single words is often cited as a key challenge for getting word learning off the ground, it overlooks the fact that young learners consistently encounter words in the context of other words. How does this company help or hinder word learning? Prior investigations into early word learning from children's real-world language input have yielded conflicting results, with some influential findings suggesting an advantage for words that keep a diverse company of other words, and others suggesting the opposite. Here, we sought to triangulate the source of this conflict, comparing different measures of diversity and approaches to controlling for correlated effects of word frequency across multiple languages. The results were striking: while different diversity measures on their own yielded conflicting results, once nonlinear relationships with word frequency were controlled, we found convergent evidence that contextual consistency supports early word learning. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: The words children learn occur in a sea of other words. The company words keep ranges from highly variable to highly consistent and circumscribed. Prior findings conflict over whether variability versus consistency helps early word learning. Accounting for correlated effects of word frequency resolved the conflict across multiple languages. Results reveal convergent evidence that consistency helps early word learning.

Contextual dynamics in lexical encoding across the ageing spectrum: A simulation study

The field of psycholinguistics has recently questioned the primacy of word frequency (WF) in influencing word recognition and production, instead focusing on the importance of a word's contextual diversity (CD). WF is operationalised by counting the number of occurrences of a word in a corpus, while a word's CD is a count of the number of contexts that a word occurs in, with repetitions within a context being ignored. Numerous studies have converged on the conclusion that CD is a better predictor of word recognition latency and accuracy than frequency. These findings support a cognitive mechanism based on the principle of likely need over the principle of repetition in lexical organisation. In the current study, we trained the semantic distinctiveness model on communication patterns in social media platforms consisting of over 55-billion-word tokens and examined the ability of theoretically distinct models to explain word recognition latency and accuracy data from over 1 million participants from the Mandera et al. English Crowdsourding Project norms, consisting of approximately 59,000 words across six age bands ranging from ages 10 to 60 years. There was a clear quantitative trend across the age bands, where there is a shift from a social environment-based attention mechanism in the "younger" models, to a clear dominance for a discourse-based attention mechanism as models "aged." This pattern suggests that there is a dynamical interaction between the cognitive mechanisms of lexical organisation and environmental information that emerges across ageing.

The potentials for incidental vocabulary acquisition from listening to computer science academic lectures: a higher education corpus-based case study from Macau

Introduction

Universities in non-Anglophone countries are increasingly implementing English as the medium of instruction (EMI) lectures. There seems to be an assumption that students' performance on standardized English examinations can be equated with the lexical knowledge needed to comprehend EMI lectures regardless of discipline. For unknown words students encounter, it is assumed that they can be picked up through listening to these lectures. This potential for students to acquire unknown words incidentally while listening to these lectures has yet to be fully explored.

Methods

This study addresses the potential of students incidentally acquiring vocabulary from listening to EMI lectures through corpus analyses of computer science lectures at one public university in Macau. Taking into consideration frequency, range, and lecturer explanation, corpus analyses of the transcripts of 28 computer science lectures (40 h 36 min) were conducted to determine the lexical knowledge needed for students to comprehend the lectures. The potential number of words these students could acquire through listening to the lectures was also uncovered through further analyses.

Results

Results showed that L2 students need to have receptive knowledge of the most frequent 3,000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words to reach beyond 95% lexical coverage. To reach 98% lexical coverage, 5,000 word families are needed. Considering frequency, range, and teacher explanation, we concluded that 30 new words could reasonably be incidentally acquired after listening to the 28 lectures.

Discussion

These results indicate a need for EMI lecturers to consider the lexical knowledge of students and whether additional pedagogical techniques (i.e., vocabulary explanation) should be employed in content classrooms when lectures are delivered in English, especially for specialized fields such as computer science. Our results also draw attention to the importance of field specific vocabulary and the potential pitfalls of using blanket English language admissions criteria when admitting students to different academic programs.

Learning Spelling From Meaning

According to the instance-based approach, each novel word encounter is encoded as an episodic trace, including different aspects of word knowledge (orthography, semantics, phonology) and context. Experiencing the novel word again leads to reactivating the previous instances to support word identification. Accordingly, once a link between orthography and meaning is established through several instances of co-occurrence, presenting the novel word form enhances semantic learning even if the contexts are uninformative about the meaning (Eskenazi et al., 2018). Here, we investigated whether informative contexts enhance orthographic learning in the absence of the novel word form. Participants read pseudowords in three definition-like sentences, followed by three unrelated filler sentences (baseline condition), three uninformative sentences (orthographic condition), or three informative sentences with synonyms replacing the pseudoword (semantic condition). After reading, participants were better at spelling pseudowords exposed in the semantic than in the baseline condition and recalled more definitions of the pseudowords exposed in the orthographic than in the baseline condition. Such results indicate that both semantic and orthographic learning benefit from the contexts where the target information is absent. Overall, this supports the instance-based approach and contributes to the understanding of the interplay between orthography and semantics in contextual word learning.

Environment Context Variability and Incidental Word Learning: A Virtual Reality Study

Previous research has shown that changes in the scenarios in which something is learned and recalled, respectively, may result in a subpar performance in memory recollection. The current study aimed to evaluate how changes in the visuo-perceptual environmental learning context impact incidental vocabulary learning. To this end, a highly immersive virtual reality setting was created, and participants were required to read eight distinct stories visually presented to them. A novel word was delivered twice in every paragraph and embedded in each story. Stories could be displayed either in a high variability condition, where each paragraph was shown in a new environment context (four different classrooms) or in a low variability condition, where each paragraph was shown in the same context. The findings obtained across four assessment tasks (free recall, recognition, picture matching, and sentence completion) demonstrated that significant visuo-perceptual variability did not bring about any disadvantages in word learning. Thus, perceptual information from a physically diverse environment could provide a variety of instructional and educational beneficial possibilities in the absence of a learning disadvantage.