ABSTRACT
To learn a new word in a second language (L2) a learner must do at least three things: encode the (phonemic, graphemic, signed) form of the new L2 word, activate an appropriate meaning (semantic representation) for the word within the learner’s semantic system (e.g., referential meaning, collocations, syntactic properties), and map the new word form onto the appropriate meaning. Each of these three subprocesses needs to be completed to learn a new word successfully, regardless of whether the word is learned incidentally from context or intentionally in a more direct manner. Therefore, the issue of how learners allocate their limited processing resources toward the completion of each of these three subprocesses is both critical to our understanding of L2 lexical acquisition from a cognitive perspective and pertinent to different types of vocabulary learning across the incidental-to-direct learning continuum (see, Coady, 1997, for a synthesis of research with reference to this continuum).
