Incidental vocabulary acquisition during reading by adult native speakers of German
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2012/05/0006/000212Keywords:
incidental vocabulary acquisition, reading, syntactic complexityAbstract
In the present study, we explore the influence of syntactic complexity on incidental vocabulary acquisition. Instead of relying on introspective research methods based on self-evaluation that have been typically used previously (e.g., the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (Paribakht & Wesche, 1996)), we employ several psycholinguistic paradigms to investigate the acquisition of various lexical aspects of the new words (especially of phonological form and meaning) under two different acquisition conditions: a) directly within the context in which the subject first encounters the new word (self-paced reading) and b) independently from the acquisition context (lexical decision and semantic priming). The results of the present study indicate that the acquisition of new words is more successful in syntactically simple contexts.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
