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Abstract
Prior research suggests that second language (L2) vocabulary learning often occurs through lexical inferencing (translations based on context), but there has been less emphasis on how lexical inferencing compares with other methods of L2 word learning. The present study compared lexical inferencing to simply studying word lists for L2 learning. A secondary goal was to determine whether any effect of inferencing is mediated by the generation effect of memory, a phenomenon wherein generated information (inferencing) is remembered better than obtained information (reading). Across four experiments, participants read English sentences with embedded Swahili words and were asked either to infer the word meaning using context or were provided with translations before reading the sentence (reading condition). In contrast to our initial hypotheses, the inference condition resulted in lower rates of retention compared with the reading condition. In addition, the data suggest a number of differences between lexical inferencing and the generation effect, that argue against the proposal that lexical inferencing operates as a type of generation effect
Keywords Memory · Language acquisition · Associative learning
To comprehend a foreign language requires learning thousands of new word forms and their meanings (Nation, 2006). Even after years of study, language learners often encounter unfamiliar words when communicating with others. Without knowing the translation of unfamiliar words, the learner must rely on contextual cues to make accurate translations that can result in the acquisition of the novel vocabulary word and incorporation into the existing lexicon. Researchers refer to the process of learning vocabulary through context using various terminology, including meaning-inferencing (Mondria, 2003), contextual-word learning (Frishkoff et al., 2016), and what we will refer to in the current study as lexical inferencing (de la Garza & Harris, 2017; Geva et al., 2017; Shen, 2010).
Lexical inferencing has occasionally been considered an example of a phenomenon referred to as the generation effect, a phenomenon wherein memory for generated information is typically better than for information that is simply read (Bertsch et al., 2007; Slamecka & Graf, 1978). For example, if given the word hot and instructed to generate an antonym (cold), memory retention for the words hot and cold improves compared with simply reading the hot-cold word pair (Bertsch et al., 2007; Slamecka & Graf, 1978). Thus, both the...