Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…

Self-generated information is better recognized and recalled than read information. This so-called generation effect has been replicated several times for different types of stimulus material, different generation tasks, and retention intervals. The present study investigated the impact of individual differences in learners' disposition to engage…

The incidental or implicit learning of vocabulary has long been a topic of interest in various disciplines. In studies on foreign language acquisition, reading is often the activity that researchers use to generate their findings. "Reading in a Foreign Language" has maintained its position at the forefront of this research, consistently…

Acquiring and retaining vocabulary knowledge are two of the most important aspects of second language (L2) learning. Some scholars (e.g. Hedrick, Harmom, & Linerode, 2004; Nation, 1999; Stone & Urquhart, 2008) advocate that we should re-think and explore in depth the importance of vocabulary. According to Wilkins (1972), "while…

For skill learning processes to be effective, they must encode associations that are inherent to the current task and avoid those that are spurious or particular to training conditions so that learning can transfer to novel situations. Some everyday contexts even require grouped responding to simultaneously presented stimuli. Here we test whether…

Eye gaze is a powerful directional cue that automatically evokes joint attention states. Even when faces are ignored, there is incidental learning of the reliability of the gaze cueing of another person, such that people who look away from targets are judged less trustworthy. In a series of experiments, we demonstrated further properties of the…

Research from the adaptive memory framework shows that thinking about words in terms of their survival value in an incidental learning task enhances their free recall relative to other semantic encoding strategies and intentional learning (Nairne, Pandeirada, & Thompson, 2008). We found similar results. When participants used incidental…