ESSENTIAL CVA READINGS

1. Thorndike, Edward L. (1917), "Reading as Reasoning: A Study of Mistakes in Paragraph Reading", The Journal of Educational Psychology 8(6): 323-332.
   • Reprinted in Reading Research Quarterly 6 (1971): 425-442, with replies.
   • Available online in PDF by clicking on the "Reprinted" version, above.
   • Fascinating, easy to read, and very influential, but not directly concerned with CVA.

2. Either:
   • Werner, Heinz, & Kaplan, Edith (1950), "Development of Word Meaning through Verbal Context: An Experimental Study", Journal of Psychology 29: 251-257.
     • A preliminary version of Werner & Kaplan 1952.
   Or:

   • Werner, Heinz, & Kaplan, Edith (1952), "The Acquisition of Word Meanings: A Developmental Study", Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc., Vol. 15, Serial No. 51, No. 1 (1950) (Evanston, IL: Child Development Publications of the Society for Research in Child Development, Northwestern University).
     • On reserve (in hard-copy format) at UGL.
     • Important and often cited, with lots of examples, but very long.

3. Granger, Richard H. (1977), "Foul-Up: a Program that Figures Out Meanings of Words from Context", Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-77, MIT) (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann): 67-68.
   • One of the first computational investigations of CVA; in the Schank/Conceptual Dependency tradition.

4. Carbonell, Jaime G. (1979), "Towards a Self-Extending Parser", Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (University of California at San Diego) (Morristown, NJ: Association for Computational Linguistics): 3-7.
   • A follow-up to Granger 1977.

5. Either:
   • Clarke, D.F., & Nation, I.S.P. (1980), "Guessing the Meanings of Words from Context: Strategy and Techniques", System 8: 211-220.

   Or:

   • Nation, Paul, & Coady, James (1988), "Vocabulary and Reading", in Ronald Carter & Michael McCarthy (eds.), Vocabulary and Language Teaching (London: Longman): 97-110.
     • What's wrong with their strategy? (Hint: Is it an algorithm?)

6. van Daalen-Kapteijns, M.M., & Elshout-Mohr, M. (1981), "The Acquisition of Word Meanings as a Cognitive Learning Process", Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 20: 386-399.
   • An important and often-cited study; one of the few that makes reference to previous work in computational CVA.

7. Beck, Isabel L.; McKeown, Margaret G.; & McCaslin, Ellen S. (1983), "Vocabulary Development: All Contexts Are Not Created Equal", Elementary School Journal 83(3): 177-181.

8. Jenkins, Joseph R., & Dixon, Robert (1983), "Vocabulary Learning", Contemporary Educational Psychology 8: 237-260.

9. Either:
   • Sternberg, Robert J., & Powell, Janet S. (1983), "Comprehending Verbal Comprehension", American Psychologist 38: 878-893.

   Or:

   • Sternberg, Robert J.; Powell, Janet S.; & Kaye, Daniel B. (1983), "Teaching Vocabulary-Building Skills: A Contextual Approach", in Alex Cherry Wilkinson (ed.), Classroom Computers and Cognitive Science (New York: Academic Press): 121-143.
     • Important, often-cited studies that provide lists of contextual clues to look for; good examples, too.

   Or:

   • Sternberg, Robert J. (1987), "Most Vocabulary is Learned from Context," in Margaret G. McKeown & Mary E. Curtis (eds.), The Nature of Vocabulary Acquisition (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates): 89-105.

10. Nagy, William E., & Anderson, Richard C. (1984), "How Many Words Are There in Printed School English?", Reading Research Quarterly 19(3, Spring): 304-330.
    • Important and often cited; presents an argument that people must be doing "incidental" CVA, because there are too many words to learn in any other way.

11. McKeown, Margaret G. (1985), "The Acquisition of Word Meaning from Context by Children of High and Low Ability", Reading Research Quarterly 20(4): 482-496.

12. Nagy, William E.; Herman, Patricia A.; & Anderson, Richard C. (1985), "Learning Words from Context", Reading Research Quarterly 20(2): 233-253.

13. Schatz, Elinore Kress, & Baldwin, R. Scott (1986), "Context Clues Are Unreliable Predictors of Word Meanings", Reading Research Quarterly 21(4, Fall): 439-453.
    • Argues that context can be useless or misleading at least as often as it can be helpful, but makes a lot of assumptions that we don't make in our CVA project.

14. Johnson-Laird, Philip N. (1987), "The Mental Representation of the Meanings of Words", Cognition 25(1-2): 189-211
    • Reprinted in Alvin I. Goldman (ed.), Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993): 561-583.
    • abstract
    • Source of our claim that definitions should not be stored.

15. Zernik, Uri, & Dyer, Michael G. (1987), "The Self-Extending Phrasal Lexicon," Computational Linguistics 13: 308-327.
    • A computational study, but uses human informants, unlike our project.

16. Berwick, Robert C. (1989), "Learning Word Meanings from Examples" [PDF], in David L. Waltz (ed.), Semantic Structures: Advances in Natural Language Processing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates): 89-124.

17. Either:
    • Hastings, Peter M., & Lytinen, Steven L. (1994a), "The Ups and Downs of Lexical Acquisition", Proceedings of the 12th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94, Seattle) (Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press/MIT Press): 754-759.
    Or:
    • Hastings, Peter M., & Lytinen, Steven L. (1994b), "Objects, Actions, Nouns, and Verbs", Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates): 397-402.
      • Online version of Hastings & Lytinen 1994a contains a bonus: Siskind 1994. Online version of Hastings & Lytinen 1994b also contains a bonus: Lampinen & Faries 1994.
      • An overlapping pair of papers; Hastings's work (based on his dissertation) is very close in spirit to ours.

18. Kibby, Michael W. (1995), "The Organization and Teaching of Things and the Words that Signify Them", Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 39(3): 208-223.
    • Discusses different levels of word (and "thing" or concept) knowledge.

19. Fukkink, R.G., & de Glopper, K. (1998), "Effects of Instruction in Deriving Word Meaning from Context: A Meta-Analysis", Review of Educational Research 68: 450-458.

20. Kuhn, Melanie R., & Stahl, Steven A. (1998), "Teaching Children to Learn Word Meanings from Context: A Synthesis and Some Questions", Journal of Literacy Research 30(1): 119-138.
    • An overview of recent CVA research.

21. Swanborn, M.S.L., & de Glopper, K. (1999), "Incidental Word Learning while Reading: A Meta-Analysis", Review of Educational Research 69: 261-285.