The role of literariness in second language incidental vocabulary acquisition

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn two reading experiments involving a self-paced reading task, we explored how literariness affects initial stages of incidental vocabulary acquisition during reading in second language German. In Experiment 1, literariness was operationalized along the formalist, language-driven approach, focusing on the role of literary devices and their assumed ability to draw readers’ attention to the verbal message itself. In Experiment 2, we included conventions related to reading fiction (book title, author name, and year of publishing) to modulate the reader’s mode of text processing, which defines literariness according to reader-driven approaches (e.g., reception theory). Contrary to the expectations based on the noticing hypothesis (Schmidt, 2012), we did not observe any advantage for incidental vocabulary acquisition in literary texts compared to nonliterary ones. However, in accordance with claims taking into account the limits of cognitive resources, we found evidence that acquisition of unknown words is impeded, if these directly participate in a literary device.