Incidental Acquisition of Foreign Language Vocabulary through Brief Multi-Modal Exposure

Abstract

First language acquisition requires relatively little effort compared to foreign language acquisition and happens more naturally through informal learning. Informal exposure can also benefit foreign language learning, although evidence for this has been limited to speech perception and production. An important question is whether informal exposure to spoken foreign language also leads to vocabulary learning through the creation of form-meaning links. Here we tested the impact of exposure to foreign language words presented with pictures in an incidental learning phase on subsequent explicit foreign language learning. In the explicit learning phase, we asked adults to learn translation equivalents of foreign language words, some of which had appeared in the incidental learning phase. Results revealed rapid learning of the foreign language words in the incidental learning phase showing that informal exposure to multi-modal foreign language leads to foreign language vocabulary acquisition. The creation of form-meaning links during the incidental learning phase is discussed.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0060912
Divisions: College of Health & Life Sciences
Additional Information: ©2013 Bisson et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all),Agricultural and Biological Sciences(all)
Publication ISSN: 1932-6203
Last Modified: 27 Mar 2024 08:14
Date Deposited: 15 Oct 2018 12:04
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://journal ... al.pone.0060912 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2013-04-08
Authors: Bisson, Marie Josée
van Heuven, Walter J.B.
Conklin, Kathy
Tunney, Richard J. (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-4673-757X)

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