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CONTEXTUAL WORD LEARNING IN THE FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE

DEFINITION PLACEMENT AND INFERENCE ERROR EFFECTS ON DECLARATIVE AND NONDECLARATIVE KNOWLEDGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2019

Irina Elgort Open the ORCID record for Irina Elgort [Opens in a new window] ,
Natalia Beliaeva  and
Frank Boers
Irina Elgort*
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington
Natalia Beliaeva
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington
Frank Boers
Affiliation:
Western University
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Irina Elgort, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Access to definitions facilitates the learning of word meanings when novel words are encountered in reading. However, the memorial costs and benefits of inferring word meanings from context, compared to seeing definitions of unfamiliar words before reading, are not yet well understood. We conducted two experiments with adult L1 (English) and L2 (Chinese) readers to investigate whether the development of declarative and nondeclarative word knowledge benefits more when definitions are supplied before reading (errorless treatment) or after reading (trial-and-error treatment). Study participants encountered 90 target vocabulary items three times in short informative texts under errorless or trial-and-error conditions and entered their meaning inferences immediately after reading each text. Posttreatment, we evaluated participants’ declarative knowledge of the target items using a meaning generation (recall) task and nondeclarative knowledge using a self-paced reading task. The trial-and-error treatment followed by definitions resulted in a superior declarative and nondeclarative knowledge, compared to the errorless treatment, for L1 and L2 readers. Inference errors affected the development of declarative but not nondeclarative knowledge, and the trajectory of the development of nondeclarative knowledge was different for L1 and L2 readers. We interpret these findings in terms of the declarative and nondeclarative memory processes underpinning contextual word learning.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 7 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

This research was supported by a research grants from Victoria University of Wellington. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Murielle Demecheleer and Mark Toomer in the data collection. We thank Susan Gass and Luke Plonsky for their editorial support, and three anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

References

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