A large body of evidence shows an animacy effect on memory in that animate entities are better remembered than inanimate ones. Yet, the reason for this mnemonic prioritization remains unclear. In the survival processing literature, the assumption that richness of encoding is responsible for adaptive memory benefits has received substantial…

Previous studies on lexical focus on form (FonF) have mostly centred on FonF in reading with a few pre-selected lexical items. This study investigated the contribution of oral incidental FonF to developing learners' lexical knowledge in a free discussion EFL class. Incidental FonF was provided to 15 upper-intermediate learners who participated in…

In two studies, we investigated how skilled readers use contextual and morphemic information in the process of incidental vocabulary acquisition during reading. In Experiment 1, we monitored skilled readers' eye movements while they silently read sentence pairs containing novel and known English compound words that were either semantically…

This study compares the relative effectiveness of reading and writing sentences for the incidental acquisition of new vocabulary in a second language. It also examines if recall varies according to the concreteness of target words. Participants were 203 French-speaking intermediate and advanced English as second language (ESL) learners, tested for…