Der verheißungsvolle Kontext und seine Leistungen bei der Erschließung von Wortbedeutungen

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (69) ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Ulrike Haß

AbstractThe paper addresses the problems learners (L1) have to encounter while deducing word meaning from a given (written) context. The first part presents a theoretical model of context for that purpose. The main parts show the results of two approaches: First, a typical text from a schoolbook is examined to point out the principal potential of a text to deduce the meanings of words unknown to the reader. The second approach presents the results of an empirical study with more than 400 students, who were asked to mark unknown words and helpful context elements in a given text. The results of both approaches point at major and minor strategies of readers when looking for explanations of word meanings. Finally, a typical context seems to be much less helpful than teachers lean on.

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-578
Author(s):  
Yuko Goto Butler

This study examines young English readers’ ability to infer word meanings in context and to use metacognitive knowledge for constructing word meanings in relation to their reading performance. The participants were 61 fourth-grade students in the United States, comprising 24 monolingual English-speaking (ME) students and 37 English-as-a-second-language (L2) students; each group was also divided into strong and emergent readers in English. Participants were asked to read aloud paragraphs containing words unfamiliar to them in two different contextual conditions (i.e., explicit and implicit conditions), to guess the unfamiliar word meanings, and to tell a teacher how they arrived at the inferred meanings. Quantitative analyses found significant differences between strong and emergent readers in their oral fluency as well as in their ability to infer word meanings and articulate their use of metacognitive knowledge. Although significant differences were found in the ability to infer word meanings and the use of metacognitive reasoning between ME and L2 students, such differences disappeared after controlling for the size of students’ receptive vocabulary. Qualitative analyses also revealed differences in the kinds of knowledge and strategies that strong and emergent readers relied on when constructing the meaning of unknown words in both explicit and implicit contexts.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M Rodd

This chapter focuses on the process by which stored knowledge about a word’s form (orthographic or phonological) maps onto stored knowledge about its meaning. This mapping is made challenging by the ambiguity that is ubiquitous in natural language: most familiar words can refer to multiple different concepts. This one-to-many mapping from form to meaning within the lexicon is a core feature of word-meaning access. Fluent, accurate word-meaning access requires that comprehenders integrate multiple cues in order to determine which of a word’s possible semantic features are relevant in the current context. Specifically, word-meaning access is guided by (i) distributional information about the a priori relative likelihoods of different word meanings and (ii) a wide range of contextual cues that indicate which meanings are most likely in the current context.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Rosche

As for students many consequential life decisions still lie ahead it is vitally important that their choices suit their abilities. Concerning education a misperception of academic ability can lead to educational misinvestment with potentially severe consequences. That is why this paper investigates if there are disparities in the ability to accurately self-evaluate school performance by social origin. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper considering this important research question. In doing so, the paper has two emphases: firstly, a theoretical model, arguing why disparities in the ability to accurately self-evaluate school performance by social origin are likely, is proposed and secondly an empirical study is conducted in order to examine if disparities by social origin are findable. The key results indicate that both students with less and students with highly educated parents underestimate their school performance if they have school grades higher than the average, and overestimate their school performance if they have school grades lower than the average. However, this relationship is intensified for students with less educated parents and therefore they self-evaluate their school performancecompared to students with highly educated parents less accurately.


2009 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 578-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Frank ◽  
Noah D. Goodman ◽  
Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Word learning is a “chicken and egg” problem. If a child could understand speakers' utterances, it would be easy to learn the meanings of individual words, and once a child knows what many words mean, it is easy to infer speakers' intended meanings. To the beginning learner, however, both individual word meanings and speakers' intentions are unknown. We describe a computational model of word learning that solves these two inference problems in parallel, rather than relying exclusively on either the inferred meanings of utterances or cross-situational word-meaning associations. We tested our model using annotated corpus data and found that it inferred pairings between words and object concepts with higher precision than comparison models. Moreover, as the result of making probabilistic inferences about speakers' intentions, our model explains a variety of behavioral phenomena described in the word-learning literature. These phenomena include mutual exclusivity, one-trial learning, cross-situational learning, the role of words in object individuation, and the use of inferred intentions to disambiguate reference.


1998 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 47-52
Author(s):  
Anita van Loon-Vervoorn ◽  
Loekie Eibers

Blind children acquire their mother tongue in a relatively 'decontextualized' way, as compared to their sighted peers. Many word meanings which sighted children learn in a predominantly visual experiential context, have to be verbally explained and defined to blind children. In consequence, blind children may be deficient in the more experientially based aspects of word meaning, but may be aheadof their,sighted peers in their acquisition of the more verbally based meaning relations between words. Our findings indicate that blind children do not seem to be 'ahead' of sighted children in the knowledge about verbally based relations but rather in the accessibility of the relations which they have in their lexicon.


Author(s):  
Katie Wagner ◽  
David Barner

Human experience of color results from a complex interplay of perceptual and linguistic systems. At the lowest level of perception, the human visual system transforms the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum into a rich, continuous three-dimensional experience of color. Despite our ability to perceptually discriminate millions of different color shades, most languages categorize color into a number of discrete color categories. While the meanings of color words are constrained by perception, perception does not fully define them. Once color words are acquired, they may in turn influence our memory and processing speed for color, although it is unlikely that language influences the lowest levels of color perception. One approach to examining the relationship between perception and language in forming our experience of color is to study children as they acquire color language. Children produce color words in speech for many months before acquiring adult meanings for color words. Research in this area has focused on whether children’s difficulties stem from (a) an inability to identify color properties as a likely candidate for word meanings, or alternatively (b) inductive learning of language-specific color word boundaries. Lending plausibility to the first account, there is evidence that children more readily attend to object traits like shape, rather than color, as likely candidates for word meanings. However, recent evidence has found that children have meanings for some color words before they begin to produce them in speech, indicating that in fact, they may be able to successfully identify color as a candidate for word meaning early in the color word learning process. There is also evidence that prelinguistic infants, like adults, perceive color categorically. While these perceptual categories likely constrain the meanings that children consider, they cannot fully define color word meanings because languages vary in both the number and location of color word boundaries. Recent evidence suggests that the delay in color word acquisition primarily stems from an inductive process of refining these boundaries.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Emilio Domínguez-Escrig ◽  
Francisco Fermín Mallén Broch ◽  
Rafael Lapiedra Alcamí ◽  
Ricardo Chiva Gómez

Abstract The main goal of the current study is to analyze the relationship between leaders' empowerment, radical innovation and organizational performance. A total of 300 Spanish companies participated in the study. In total, 600 valid questionnaires were obtained. Structural equations were used to validate the proposed hypotheses. Two different respondents in each company were selected to provide information. All the hypotheses proposed in the theoretical model were confirmed. This research provides empirical evidence of the relationship between leaders' empowerment and organizational performance, highlighting the mediation role played by radical innovation. Leaders who empower, promote radical innovation and, in turn, performance. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study that analyzes the effect of leader's empowerment on radical innovation. Although in the former literature there are evidences of a positive relationship between empowerment and innovation, there are no studies that differentiate between innovation typologies.


Semiotica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (230) ◽  
pp. 247-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignasi Ribó

AbstractCommunicative interactions across different species have so far received relatively little attention from cognitive or behavioral scientists. Most research in this area views the process of communication as the adaptive interaction of manipulative signalers and information-assessing receivers. This paper discusses some shortcomings of the information/influence model of communication, particularly in the empirical study of interspecific communicative interactions. It then presents an alternative theoretical model, based on recent contributions in psycholinguistics and semiotics. The semiotic alignment model views communication as a dynamic process of joint semiosis resulting in the alignment of the interactants’ own-worlds (Umwelten). It is argued that this model can improve our understanding of communicative interactions between heterospecifics and provide the basis for future work in the empirical study of interspecific communication.


1976 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Reich

ABSTRACTThe development of the meaning of shoe in one pre-lingual child, plus additional examples drawn from the literature, support a notion that word meanings start out very narrow and only become overextended later, though sometimes before the word is spoken. This appears to contradict the course of development of meaning hypothesized by Clark (1973). It is argued that the early development of word meaning is simply a special case of a much more general learning process.


2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEFKA H. MARINOVA-TODD

The possible advantage of bilingual children over monolinguals in analyzing word meanings from verbal context was examined. The subjects were 40 third-grade children (20 bilingual and 20 monolingual) recruited from independent schools in the USA. The two groups of participants were compared on their performance on a standardized test of receptive vocabulary and an experimental measure of word meanings, the Word–Context Test. Results revealed that on average, the bilingual children had smaller vocabularies in English. The bilinguals deduced the meaning from context of more words than the monolingual children, although there were no differences between groups on the rate of reaching the target meanings for words on which they were successful, and on the quality of their definitions. Moreover, bilingual children approached the task differently and they showed greater flexibility when analyzing word meanings from verbal context, thus indicating that bilinguals may be more efficient vocabulary learners than monolinguals.


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