Incidental Vocabulary Learning and Memory of Context : Interaction Between Informativeness and Imageability

Abstract

To develop vocabulary skills, it is necessary for language learners to know how words are used in context. However, past studies have rarely investigated how learners mentally establish the relationship between lexical items and contexts. To examine whether and how they retain contextual information in relation to the lexical items, an experiment was conducted with 46 university students. They incidentally learned 10 pseudowords in a glossed context and were asked to recall as much contextual information as they could. As a result, the participants incidentally constructed the word-context association for 42% of the items, but the rate was reduced to 20% after a one-month delay. The data were further analyzed in terms of two contextual variables: context informativeness and imageability. It was found that word-context connections were significantly affected by the interaction between the two variables. The result suggested that when the learners were asked to recall contextual information, they depended on mental imagery aroused from context if the presented context had less informativeness. Thus, it was revealed that learners constructed word-context association through reading under the influence of the two textual factors. The research findings suggest teachers constantly provide students with contextual input that is sufficiently imageable and/or informative.