Etymology of Modern English Vocabulary. Content Introduction

1. Comprehension and retention of foreign language words
presented in texts
The first experiment was meant to gain insight into the nature of the psychological processes involved in vocabulary learning through reading. It was organized as follows. Ten Dutch-speaking adults of whom it was known or could be assumed that they were able in introspecting (which is crucial in this type of explorative research) were asked to read foreign language texts which contained a substantial amount of unknown words. In order to gain as much information as possible the texts used were of different types, different levels and in different languages (English, French, German and Italian).
The subjects were encouraged to guess the meaning of the unknown words before looking them up in a dictionary. The subjects knew that some of these words would be tested, but were requested not to memorize them explicitly. The words were tested twice: after an interval of one week and after an interval of two months. While recalling the meaning of the words, the subjects had to think aloud. The recall protocols were analyzed with respect to a) the ways in which presenting words in texts contributes to a better embedding of new words in memory and b) textual and psychological conditions that should be met when presenting new words in texts.
The results of this experiment shed light on the many opportunities which text reading offers to embed words in meaningful memory systems. Indeed, the subjects could and did use many different access roads to retrieve the required word meaning. So in some cases a new word and its meaning proved to be connected with recollections of the situation in which it had occurred in the text or with recollections of images which were formed of those situations during the reading process. For instance, one of the subjects remembered the meaning of the word "dusk", because the image of evening falling on a salt plain (from the story she read) suddenly occurred to her. Besides, the new word and its meaning sometimes appeared to be connected with recollections of the literal word group or sentence in the text, with recollections of the fact that the word had occurred more than once, with recollections of the fact that a word with the same root had also occurred or with recollections concerning the position of the word in the text. Finally the new word and its meaning were often connected with recollections
of emotions or experiences which the words, the text or the actions of the subjects
themselves had evoked. The subjects reported, for instance, having experienced some word forms as funny or strange, having felt proud about a correct guess or having felt stupid when looking up the same word twice.[3]
In order to track down the so-called textual conditions the recall protocols were analyzed for factors in the meaning and the structure of the words and the text as a whole which could have hampered the retention of the new words. Occurrence in inconspicuous or ambiguous contexts proved to be an unfavourable condition as did the occurrence of two or more words in one text which were similar in form and/or in meaning but not related.
In order to find the so-called psychological conditions which should be met when presenting words in texts the protocol records were analysed to trace the actions on the language material which enhance retention of the new words. In general, a three phase action- sequence proved to be most effective, i.e. guessing the meaning of the unknown word, verifying the guess (e.g. in a dictionary) and analyzing the word form. By and large the more different ways the words were dealt with, the better they were learned as could, indeed, be predicted by the theory of trace systems in memory (more information about this experiment and examples from the protocol records may be found in a Dutch publication.