Tracking the incremental acquisition of second language vocabulary: A longitudinal study

Previous vocabulary research has focused on the size of lexicons and the number of words learned through various activities. To date, this type of research has generated little understanding of how individual words are acquired. To explore this issue, I tracked the acquisition of 11 words over the course of a year for 3 adult learners with advanced profi-ciency in English. I measured 4 kinds of word knowledge: spelling, associations, grammatical information, and mean-ing. The participants had little problem with spelling, but rarely knew all of a target word’s meaning senses or deriva-tional word forms. Knowledge of the meaning senses of the target words improved about 2.5 times more than it was forgotten, and some of the word knowledge types appear to be interrelated. However, the study did not show evidence of a developmental hierarchy for word knowledge types. The mechanics of vocabulary acquisition is one of the more intriguing puzzles in second language acquisition (SLA). Language Learning 48:2, June 1998, pp. 281–317 I would like to thank the participants for their patience and help. Thanks also to Della Summers and Keith Mardell of Longman Publishing for access to the BNC, and Gwyneth Fox and Rosamund Moon of COBUILD for access to the Bank of English corpus. Ron Carter, Mike McCarthy, Paul Meara, and Diane Schmitt provided valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper