S0112 · miller_gildea_1987_dictionary_context · registry identity
How Children Learn Words
External resolution
Resolution status: resolved
Miller, Gildea · 1987 · Scientific American · journal-article
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Canonical propositions this source was matched as evidence for.
How Hirsch uses it
Every occurrence, grouped by book and chapter, with the claim it was linked to support and (where the extraction regenerated one) the underlying warrant.
2016 · Why Knowledge Matters
George A. Miller's work on the limitations of 'looking things up.'
related Looking things up is a completely unsatisfactory procedure compared to having knowledge already present in a well-stocked mind.
Studies showing children's frustration and loss of context when using paper dictionaries to find word meanings.
direct Children often experience frustration when looking up words because they lose the original context of their reading before they can construe the meaning.
Warrant (implicit): A disruption in the temporal flow of reading caused by an external search for definitions prevents the synthesis of the text's overall meaning.
could fail ifRe-reading the surrounding sentence after looking up a word can effectively restore the lost context and actually strengthen the semantic connection.
Research showing that dictionary-based word study often results in inaccurate understanding of word connotations compared to context-based learning.
direct Explicit word study using a dictionary often promotes an inaccurate understanding of word connotations.
Warrant (explicit): Isolated definitions provided by dictionaries lack the nuanced semantic information required for a child to grasp a word's proper usage.
could fail ifChildren may struggle with dictionary definitions because of poor reading skills in the definitions themselves, not because explicit study is inherently inferior to context.
2020 · How to Educate a Citizen
A study where children given dictionary definitions without context produced nonsensical sentences (e.g., 'That news is very tenet').
direct In the absence of prior relevant knowledge, reference works like dictionaries and encyclopedias are often useless or distorting.
Warrant (implicit): A failure to correctly use a new piece of information without its underlying conceptual framework indicates that such information is functionally useless without prior knowledge.
could fail ifThe errors might result from the specific linguistic difficulty of the dictionary definitions provided (poor lexicography) rather than a lack of general background knowledge.
Endnote numbers seen
Raw book:chapter:endnote references collected during endnote backfill.
wkm:4:43wkm:4:45wkm:5:22
Raw source_reference strings seen
As they appeared before normalization/consolidation into this source identity.
George A. Miller (2000)George A. Miller and Patricia M. Gildea, 'How Children Learn Words'George A. Miller and Patricia M. Gildea, 'How Children Learn Words' (1987)