Minor manipulations matter: Syntactic position influences the effectiveness of incidental vocabulary acquisition during L2 reading

Abstract

This chapter reports on a study that addresses the role of syntactic prominence, that is, the perceived importance of sentence constituents, in L1 and L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition. In a self-paced reading study with 80 native German speakers and 64 advanced learners of German, we explored the initial stages of vocabulary acquisition. The results revealed an acquisition advantage for the meanings of new words that appeared as subjects in main clauses compared to those that appeared as objects in subordinate clauses in L2, but not in L1. We argue that the acquisition advantage for words with high syntactic prominence in L2 can be attributed to a higher allocation of the readers’ attention to prominent sentence constituents. L1 participants did not display this benefit because their high linguistic competence allowed sufficient processing of both subject and object, main and subordinate clauses. The findings demonstrate that syntactic prominence has, so far, been an overlooked factor in incidental vocabulary acquisition, which, however, has important implications for teaching material design and vocabulary presentation.