Individual differences and intake of novel words in L2 written input

Abstract

The study aims to analyse the effects of the individual differences of L2 educational background, working memory capacity, vocabulary size, and attitude both in the L1 and the L2 on the incidental learning of receptive and productive knowledge of the following word's aspects: association, grammatical functions, and orthographic forms. The participants were 17 students learning English as a foreign language in San Jose, Costa Rica. They completed a battery of pre-tests for individual differences before the main exposure task, and they undertook six post-tests to determine their receptive and productive knowledge of the words' aspects mentioned above. Results showed that, overall, participants scored higher in all the receptive tasks than the productive ones; that association scores were significantly higher than those of grammatical functions; that scores on the productive orthography task were significantly higher than both the association and the grammatical tasks; that L1 reading for pleasure has an effect in receptive knowledge of orthographic forms and productive knowledge of grammatical functions, that phonetic memory has an effect on the receptive and productive knowledge of grammatical functions, and that the intake of nouns was higher than that of verbs and adjectives.