ABSTRACT
Incidental vocabulary learning has been theoretically grounded in at least two postulations, namely, the involvement load hypothesis (Hulstijn & Laufer, 2001) and the Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt, 1990). This study examined the effect of the cognitive load in the task of comprehending texts that include unknown words on learner attention and incidental L2 vocabulary learning. The cognitive load of the task was operationalized by two levels: reading with and without marginal glosses of the unknown words. Although the results indicated that both groups learned and retained the target words significantly, the Gloss group outperformed the No Gloss group only in the immediate posttest. The relatively stronger retention observed by the No Gloss group on the delayed posttest appeared to be associated with the longer eye fixation on target words and more frequent fixations per word by this group, potentially underscoring the role of depth of processing in retention.
