Comparing incidental learning of nouns and verbs using eye movements

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educational Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2012

Author dc:creator

• Wochna, Kacey

Contributors dc:contributor

• Christianson, Kiel

• incidental word learning
• learning from context
• part of speech
• eye-tracking

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2012 Kacey L Wochna

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/31141

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/31141