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The present study investigates cross-situational word learning in school-age foreign language (FL) learners. Further, it takes an individual difference framework, exploring learner variables that may affect cross-situational learning in school-age FL learners. FL learners constantly encounter ambiguous situations (Ely, 1989). Ambiguity can occur in many aspects of a linguistic message, including sound pattern, word boundary, and/or word meaning. Current pedagogical trends emphasize contextualized vocabulary learning in nonostensive contexts where words are mentioned but not directly taught. Not all input needs to be comprehensible (White, 1987). There are occasions when novel words are mentioned but not explicitly taught, rendering ambiguity in form to meaning mappings, such as listening to stories, shared book reading, watching videos, or following directions in the classroom. In those ambiguous occasions, even when a word form is appropriately chunked from the continuous speech stream and encoded, a FL learner may still encounter multiple possible referents for that word. For example, during shared storybook reading, young FL leaners may hear a novel word in a picture that depicts several objects that they cannot name yet. While FL learners nowadays have a greater chance to learn words in a variety of nonostensive contexts, not much is known about how FL learners resolve referential ambiguity and what learner variables are associated with their ability to disambiguate a word's meaning.
Children's ability to make informed guesses about a word's meaning in referentially ambiguous situations has been widely discussed and investigated in studies of first language (L1) acquisition. When the situation is highly constrained, for example, when there is only one name-unknown object, children seem to circumvent the problem of referential indeterminacy with some built-in biases. They are more likely to map a novel name onto an object for which they do not have a label than an object for which they already have a name (e.g., Au & Glusman, 1990; Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Bailey, & Wenger, 1992; Golinkoff, Mervis, & Hirsh-Pasek, 1994; Markman & Wachtel, 1988; Merriman & Bowman, 1989). Such lexical biases have been consistently demonstrated in L1 children and are considered robust and fundamental in learning early L1 words (de Marchena, Eigsti, Worek, Ono, & Snedeker, 2011; Golinkoff et al., 1992). This pattern of...