Impact of contextual constraint on vocabulary acquisition in reading^*

* Portions of this research were presented in March 2013 at the 26th annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing at the University of South Carolina.

ABSTRACT

The current study investigated the influence of contextual constraint (strong versus moderate) on incidental vocabulary acquisition in reading, as eye movements of adult skilled readers were monitored. Surprise post-tests followed the reading session, and eye movement behaviour was directly connected to retention data. Longer and more frequent reading/rereading was associated with trials containing a novel target (rather than a known control), and unique patterns of connective rereading between constraint conditions were observed. For reading measures reflecting target word processing and connecting target with context, fixations were generally longer and more frequent for moderate constraint than for strong. The exception was in rereading of informative context, which was generally longer for strong constraint. More and longer fixations while connecting novel targets with informative context proved critical for novel word retention, significantly so for moderate constraint but not for strong, based on eye movement data associated with memory for novel word stimuli.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocabulary acquisition
• eye movements
• constraint
• reading
• word learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

* Portions of this research were presented in March 2013 at the 26th annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing at the University of South Carolina.

1 Based on summed (average) unigram, bigram, and trigram frequencies from Medler and Binder’s Online Orthographic Database (http://www.neuro.mcw.edu/mcword). Pairwise comparisons revealed no significant differences in mean orthographic frequency between target word conditions.