Abstract
Previous studies have insisted that attention to both the meaning and form of new lexical items is a prerequisite for vocabulary learning through inferencing. However, the kinds of language cues conducive to this process have not yet been thoroughly examined. Therefore, this think-aloud study investigates the relationship between inferential strategies, inference success, and subsequent vocabulary learning, focusing on the properties of two cue types (i.e., the presence of a prefix × the degree of contextual constraint). A total of 10 Japanese undergraduates and graduates read a short passage containing target words of different cue types and inferred their meanings. Thirty minutes after the inference task, a vocabulary test was administered to measure vocabulary learning. The results demonstrated that the degree of inference success was higher for target words in strong constraint context irrespective of a prefix’s presence. As for learning, the retention rate was high for prefixed target words or those in less constraining sentences. However, the pattern of strategy use for words in weakly constraining contexts contradicted the overall tendency for form-focused strategies to correlate with retention; qualitative analysis of some protocols implied that learners attended to forms of unknown words more often for the words in weakly constraining contexts.
