How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena. By inducing global knowledge indirectly from local co-occurrence data in a large body of representative text, LSA acquired knowledge about the full vocabulary of English at a comparable rate to schoolchildren. LSA uses no prior linguistic or perceptual similarity knowledge; it is based solely on a general mathematical learning method that achieves powerful inductive effects by extracting the right number of dimensions (e.g., 300) to represent objects and contexts. Relations to other theories, phenomena, and problems are sketched. Prologue "How much do we know at any time? Much more, or so I believe, than we know we know!" —Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger A typical American seventh grader knows the meaning of

In the REAP system, users are automatically provided with texts to read targeted to their individual reading levels. To find appropriate texts, the user’s vocabulary knowledge must be assessed. We describe an approach to automatically generating questions for vocabulary assessment. Traditionally, these assessments have been hand-written. Using data from WordNet, we generate 6 types of vocabulary questions. They can have several forms, including wordbank and multiple-choice. We present experimental results that suggest that these automatically-generated questions give a measure of vocabulary skill that correlates well with subject performance on independently developed humanwritten questions. In addition, strong correlations with standardized vocabulary tests point to the validity of our approach to automatic assessment of word knowledge. 1

This article reviews 14 studies investigating approaches that aimed at teaching children to be more efficient at learning words from context. In nearly all of the studies reviewed, treatments were effective at improving children’s skill in learning words from context compared to a no-treatment control. However, in the 4 studies that included a practice-only treatment, no significant differences were found between the strategy treatment and practice-only groups. These findings suggest that the effects of the treatments were due to the practice rather than to the specific strategies taught. Suggestions are made for improving research examining the effects of context-clue strategies. JLR kuhn & stahl The amount of words in a person’s meaning vocabulary is the best predictor

Help children learn vocabulary by reading Vocabulary is fundamental to reading. As elementary students cross over from learning to read into reading to learn, vocabulary knowledge becomes increasingly important. The massive amount of vocabulary a student must learn precludes large amounts of time spent on any single word (Carver 1994, Schwanenflugel et al. 1997), except perhaps for some words that the student will read and write many times over the course of a lifetime. Therefore students must learn vocabulary from text. 1 Help children learn vocabulary during computer assisted oral reading Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor listens to children read aloud, and helps them learn to read (Mostow & Aist CALICO 1999). The Reading Tutor shows the child a story

ONE OF the most compelling findings from recent reading research is that children who get off to a poor start in reading rarely catch up.As several studies have now documented, the poor first-grade reader almost invariably continues to be a poor reader (Francis, Shaywitz, Stuebing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996; Torgesen & Burgess, 1998).And the consequences of a slow start in reading become monumental as they accumulate exponentially over time. As Stanovich (1986) pointed out in his well-known paper on the “Matthew effects ” (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer) associated with failure to acquire early word reading skills, these consequences range from negative attitudes toward reading (Oka & Paris, 1986), to reduced opportunities for vocabulary growth (Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985), to missed opportunities for development of reading comprehension strategies (Brown, Palinscar, & Purcell, 1986), to less actual practice in reading than other children receive (Arlington, 1984). The best solution to the problem of reading failure is to allocate resources for early identification and prevention. It is a tragedy of the first order that while we know clearly the costs of waiting too long, few school districts have in place a mechanism to identify and help children before failure takes hold. Indeed, in the majority of cases, there is no systematic identification until third grade, by which time successful remediation is more difficult and more costly. School-based preventive efforts should be engineered to maintain growth in critical word reading Joseph K. Torgesen is currently a Distinguished Research Professor of psychology and education at Florida State University. For the last ten years, he has been part of the research effort sponsored by the National Institutes of Health to identify the nature, causes, and best approaches to instruction for children with moderate to severe reading problems. The

We describe two experiments related to learning new words in context. We study two types of new words: metaphors (for whom a related meaning already exists) and artificial words. The new words were used anaphorically to refer to past objects in the text. For anaphoric metaphors, subjects showed an initial bias to adopt a literal interpretation, which shifted as the experiment progressed. Subjects learned the meaning of the metaphors more rapidly and more accurately. After repeated exposure to the words in appropriate contexts, metaphoric sentences were processed comparably with the sentences made only of familiar words, whereas artificial-word sentences maintained a slight disadvantage. Results suggest that participants used context matching to understand and learn new words. We present a computational model that captures the essential trends in the data obtained from the two experiments.

A number of software programs on the market claim to foster literacy development. However, we know little about the pedagogical underpinnings of such products, particularly the extent to which they are aligned with current research for both L1 and L2 learners. This study "lifts the lid off " 16 wellreviewed software products designed for elementary grade students-- those products that make explicit claims about developing students ' lexical knowledge and those that do not. The study also examines the potential of technology (e.g., hypertext, animations) to enhance vocabulary learning. The following guidelines, derived from research, were used to examine each product. Does instruction relate the new to the known? Does it promote active indepth processing? Does it provide multiple exposures of new words? Does it teach students to be strategic readers? And does it promote additional reading? Findings indicated that many products that made no explicit claims about fostering vocabulary learning, in fact, incorporated more guidelines than many that made explicit claims. Those in the latter group often merely varied a drill and practice routine rather than helping students really know a word. Findings also indicated that the potential of technology to help students understand word meanings has yet to be fully exploited. … anybody who writes down to children is simply wasting... time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding … Children love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.--E. B. White (1969)

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This study investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary items. Two groups of 15 seven- to eight-year olds participated : children with normally developing reading comprehension skill and children with weak reading comprehension skill. The children read short stories containing a novel word and were required to produce a meaning for the novel word, both before and after its useful defining context. The proximity of the novel word to this context was manipulated. The results supported the hypothesis that children with weak reading comprehension skills are impaired in their ability to integrate information within a text, particularly when that information is non-adjacent and the processing demands are, therefore, high. Analysis of the error data revealed a similar pattern of types of errors for both groups : children with poor reading comprehension were not more likely to produce a thematically inappropriate response than their skilled peers.

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