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Tracking the Incremental Acquisition of Second Language Vocabulary: A Longitudinal Study
Author(s) -
Schmitt Norbert
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9922.00042
Subject(s) - spelling , psychology , vocabulary , linguistics , meaning (existential) , vocabulary development , age of acquisition , word (group theory) , cognition , philosophy , neuroscience , psychotherapist
Previous vocabulary research has focused on the size of lexicons and the number of words learned through various activities. To date, this type of research has generated little understanding of how individual words are acquired. To explore this issue, I tracked the acquisition of 11 words over the course of a year for 3 adult learners with advanced proficiency in English. I measured 4 kinds of word knowledge: spelling, associations, grammatical information, and meaning. The participants had little problem with spelling, but rarely knew all of a target word's meaning senses or derivational word forms. Knowledge of the meaning senses of the target words improved about 2.5 times more than it was forgotten, and some of the word knowledge types appear to be interrelated. However, the study did not show evidence of a developmental hierarchy for word knowledge types.