Elgort Irina, Perfetti Charles A, Rickles Ben, Stafura Joseph Z
Victoria University of Wellington, 6140, New Zealand.
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.
Lang Cogn Neurosci. 2015 Jun 1;30(5):506-528. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2014.942673.
New word learning occurs incidentally through exposure to language. Hypothesizing that effectiveness of contextual word learning in a second language (L2) depends on the quality of existing lexical semantic knowledge, we tested more and less proficient adult bilinguals in an incidental word learning task. One day after being exposed to rare words in an L2 (English) reading task, the bilinguals read sentences with the newly-learned words in the sentence-final position, followed by related or unrelated meaning probes. Both proficiency groups showed some learning through faster responses on related trials and a frontal N400 effect observed during probe word reading. However, word learning was more robust for the higher-proficiency group, who showed a larger semantic relatedness effect in unfamiliar contexts and a canonical N400 (central-parietal). The results suggest that the ability to learn the meanings of new words from context depends on the L2 lexical semantic knowledge of the reader.
新词学习是通过接触语言而偶然发生的。假设第二语言（L2）中语境化单词学习的有效性取决于现有词汇语义知识的质量，我们在一项偶然的单词学习任务中测试了熟练程度不同的成年双语者。在以L2（英语）阅读任务接触罕见单词一天后，双语者阅读句末带有新学单词的句子，随后是相关或不相关的意义探测。两个熟练程度组都通过在相关试验中更快的反应以及在探测词阅读过程中观察到的额叶N400效应表现出一定的学习。然而，对于熟练程度较高的组来说，单词学习更稳固，他们在不熟悉的语境中表现出更大的语义相关性效应以及典型的N400（中央顶叶）。结果表明，从语境中学习新单词意义的能力取决于读者的L2词汇语义知识。
