{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/31141"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/31141","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"Comparing incidental learning of nouns and verbs using eye movements","abstract":"It has long been assumed that people learn much of their vocabulary incidentally during the course of natural reading. Prior research has identified a host of factors that affect the ease or likelihood of learning a new word from written context. Findings from various areas of cognitive science suggest that part of speech should be one such factor. Nouns and verbs differ in their syntactic and semantic roles. As a result of these differences, verbs are generally considered to be harder to process and harder to learn. Most incidental word learning studies are not appropriate for examining part of speech differences, and those that have tried have found inconclusive results. In the present study, the effect of part of speech on incidental word learning was isolated and examined. Participants read real and novel nouns and verbs in one and two single sentence contexts while their eyes were tracked. Post-tests of word knowledge indicated that nouns were learned more effectively than verbs. The reading times for sentences containing novel nouns and verbs reflected the differences between these word classes. Readers devoted more attention to contextual information when a novel word was a verb. Reading patterns were also distinctly affected by multiple exposures to the novel word in either the same context or different contexts.","abstract_html":"It has long been assumed that people learn much of their vocabulary incidentally during the course of natural reading. Prior research has identified a host of factors that affect the ease or likelihood of learning a new word from written context. Findings from various areas of cognitive science suggest that part of speech should be one such factor. Nouns and verbs differ in their syntactic and semantic roles. As a result of these differences, verbs are generally considered to be harder to process and harder to learn. Most incidental word learning studies are not appropriate for examining part of speech differences, and those that have tried have found inconclusive results. In the present study, the effect of part of speech on incidental word learning was isolated and examined. Participants read real and novel nouns and verbs in one and two single sentence contexts while their eyes were tracked. Post-tests of word knowledge indicated that nouns were learned more effectively than verbs. The reading times for sentences containing novel nouns and verbs reflected the differences between these word classes. Readers devoted more attention to contextual information when a novel word was a verb. Reading patterns were also distinctly affected by multiple exposures to the novel word in either the same context or different contexts.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Wochna, Kacey"],"institution":"University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign","degree_name":"M.S.","degree_level":"Thesis","degree_discipline":"Educational Psychology","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Christianson, Kiel"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2012,"date_issued":"2012-05-22T00:30:41Z","date_published":"2012-05-22T00:30:41Z","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:25:30Z","subjects":["incidental word learning","learning from context","part of speech","eye-tracking"],"languages":["en"],"rights":["Copyright 2012 Kacey L Wochna"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"http://hdl.handle.net/2142/31141","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Christianson, Kiel"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Wochna, Kacey"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2012-05-22T00:30:41Z","2012-05"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["text"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Educational Psychology"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["M.S."]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["incidental word learning","learning from context","part of speech","eye-tracking"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Copyright 2012 Kacey L Wochna"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["http://hdl.handle.net/2142/31141"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["It has long been assumed that people learn much of their vocabulary incidentally during the course of natural reading. Prior research has identified a host of factors that affect the ease or likelihood of learning a new word from written context. Findings from various areas of cognitive science suggest that part of speech should be one such factor. Nouns and verbs differ in their syntactic and semantic roles. As a result of these differences, verbs are generally considered to be harder to process and harder to learn. Most incidental word learning studies are not appropriate for examining part of speech differences, and those that have tried have found inconclusive results. In the present study, the effect of part of speech on incidental word learning was isolated and examined. Participants read real and novel nouns and verbs in one and two single sentence contexts while their eyes were tracked. Post-tests of word knowledge indicated that nouns were learned more effectively than verbs. The reading times for sentences containing novel nouns and verbs reflected the differences between these word classes. Readers devoted more attention to contextual information when a novel word was a verb. Reading patterns were also distinctly affected by multiple exposures to the novel word in either the same context or different contexts.","Item withdrawn by Alexis Thompson (athmpsn1@illinois.edu) on 2012-04-19T21:50:35Z Item was in collections: University of Illinois Theses & Dissertations (ID: 1) No. of bitstreams: 1 Wochna_Kacey.pdf: 424155 bytes, checksum: db0dc6d6bb9845c23c9c24adc27811c4 (MD5)","Made available in DSpace on 2012-05-22T00:30:41Z (GMT). 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Most incidental word learning studies are not appropriate for examining part of speech differences, and those that have tried have found inconclusive results. In the present study, the effect of part of speech on incidental word learning was isolated and examined. Participants read real and novel nouns and verbs in one and two single sentence contexts while their eyes were tracked. Post-tests of word knowledge indicated that nouns were learned more effectively than verbs. The reading times for sentences containing novel nouns and verbs reflected the differences between these word classes. Readers devoted more attention to contextual information when a novel word was a verb. 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