| Two purposes this present work means to achieve. The first is to reveal the cognitive processes in learning vocabulary. The second is to probe the key issues in mastering vocabulary.First, in section one, vocabulary learning is probed through the large domain of cognitive science: neuroscience, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence perspectives mainly. In section two, vocabulary learning is observed in practice, to find out the several important issues in vocabulary learning procedurels. And, I suggest that vocabulary learning is to seek the kind of meaningful learning which is to find the connections between the new knowledge and the prior one. Meaningful learning has two types of connection. One is the microlevel connection, such as the synonymous, antonymous, and subordinate-superordinate connections, and the similars in phonology and orthography. The other is the macrolevel connection, which I termed 'semantic schematic network'. The semantic schematic network is capable of containing new and old words in a meaningful manner, based on the article or story. After analyzing the methods of vocabulary teaching in the literature, I assume that these skills and techniques are to seek the word links at microlevel. Although these methods are consistent with themeaningful learning, they ignored the word links at macrolevels------the semantic schematic networkwhich contains words in an article by a meaningful manner. Drawing such a network can not only help students to memorize new words, link new and old words together, but also facilitate their understanding of the article. This kind of exercise can be integrated in classhour, or be an assignment for students themselves.The studies of neuroscience reveal the changes occurred in the neuron structure. Under the pressure of stimuli, the synapse of neuron responds to the stimuli, such as the two extremes of synapse fattened, the birth of a new synapse forming a new circuit, the prior synapse hooking the other related neurons. New information is kept in these sophisticated and complex neuron structures. In another word, a new structure, under the pressure of stimuli, builds itself on the prior structure. In cognitive psychology, more precisely the study of the representation of human declarative knowledge, the studies find out that declarative knowledge is stored in a semantic network, which experts call 'Activation-Spreading Network'. The construction of a bilingual's declarative knowledge abides by the meaningful learning. It starts its building from the prior semantic network. Foreign language learning in Chinese circumstance, first, is to seek the one to one relation in the two languages' vocabulary. Due to the physical law of this globe and the globalization of economics and culture, Chinese and English systems share the common concepts in language system, though differs in phonology and orthography, such as words which symbolize natural phenomena, family structure, humanity, needs and desire. These shared words and concepts are the fundamental basis for international and cultural communication and the translation as well. The English course books for elementary school children exhibits this characteristic. The vocabulary in these course books is tangible, of high frequency and short in form. After the beginning stage, the important point in leaning vocabulary is to seek theconnections among words, the macrolevel connections------semantic schematic network. ParallelVDistributed Processing (PDF) of Artificial Intelligence successfully simulates human's learning aptitude. The PDF model is inspired by the neural structure. The idealized neural synapse of the PDF model is a node, each node has a weight, called threshold, which imitates the neuron's action, activation and inhibition. If the stimuli are below the threshold, the node will inhibit an action, or pass the stimuli to other related nodes. The weight tunes itself to the materials to give a correct response. Thus, the status of the nodes in the model keeps the experience. Then w...
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