Session 2C

One area that has received considerable attention within cognitive psychology is lag effect, or how spacing gaps of varying lengths between different learning sessions might influence learning (Cepeda et al., 2008; Rohrer & Pashler, 2007). These studies show that the optimal time between practice sessions or intersession intervals (ISIs) depends on retention interval (RI) or when testing takes place. Despite an upsurge of interest in distribution of practice effects in L2 learning, a limited number of studies have investigated the relationship between ISI and RI in relation to vocabulary, and this research has primarily focused on single words (Rogers & Cheung, 2020; Serrano & Huang, 2018, 2020). No study, to the best of our knowledge, has explored the impact of practice distribution on the acquisition of phrasal lexicon.
To fill this gap, the current study employed a pretest-treatment-delayed posttest design to explore the effects of longer versus shorter spacing practice for the incidental acquisition of L2 collocations in the context of reading. There were 142 Arabic learners of English in total who were divided into four groups representing four conditions: shorter spaced (3.5-day ISI), Control 1, longer spaced (7-day ISI), and Control 2. The target items were 25 adjective-noun collocations borrowed from Macis et al. (2021). They were seeded into five short stories where each collocation occurred once (unenhanced) in each passage (total exposures per collocation = 5). The 7-day ISI group read the five stories once every week for five consecutive weeks. The 3.5 ISI group read the same stories twice a week over a period of two and a half weeks. The participants in both conditions were instructed to read for general comprehension. After each reading, the students answered several comprehension questions, but there was no focus on the target vocabulary. The control groups, on the other hand, completed the tests only and reverted to their normal classes between pretest and delayed posttest. In order to provide a more complete picture of lexical development (Webb, 2005), collocational gains were measured at two mastery levels: meaning recall and form recall. Following Serrano and Huang (2018), a 25% ISI to RI ratio was adopted. Thus, the delayed posttest for the shorter spaced group and the Control 1 was administered 14 days after the last session. Conversely, the longer spaced group and Control 2 took the delayed posttest 28 days after the last session.
Results of mixed-logit models (controlling for the pretest scores) show that in both conditions and for both measures, the experimental groups achieved significant gains (with a large effect) over the control groups. More importantly, findings indicate that there was no significant difference between learning gains in the shorter spaced group and the longer spaced group. In other words, the timing of the review did not significantly influence the long-term retention of L2 collocations when these were learned incidentally. The presentation will conclude with the implications of these findings to theories of second language acquisition and to pedagogical practice.

Research on adult second language acquisition (L2A) has shown that some late L2 learners display nativelike performance for specific linguistic features (e.g. Lahmann, Steinkrauss and Schmid 2016). However, they generally do not perform within the L1 speaker range when assessed across the board for challenging L2 structures (see Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam 2009; Granena and Long 2013). Furthermore, researchers suggest that age effects tend to diminish after approximately 15 years of age (e.g. Abrahamsson 2012) and that the importance of social and psychological factors then increases (see also Hyltenstam 2018). Thus far, the most studied factor is that of language aptitude, which has been found to be an important factor in several studies (e.g. Granena and Long 2013). However, scholars argue that there is a need to include a larger variety of factors to fully understand adult L2A (e.g. Moyer 2013; Douglas Fir Group 2016). This is what Dollmann, Kogan and Weiβmann (2020) did in a recent study, which showed that cognitive ability, education and social networks combined affected the degree of foreign accent in post-puberty learners. This study thus aims to contribute to this line of research.
The study investigates how psychological and social factors relate to productive collocation knowledge in late L2 learners of Swedish (French L1) (N=59) with a minimum length of residence (LOR) of 5 years in Sweden. The included individual factors are: language aptitude (LLAMA), reported language use, social networks, acculturation (VIA), and personality (MPQ). Multiple linear regression analysis showed that positive effects were found for LLAMA D (phonetic memory), LLAMA E (sound-symbol correspondence), reported language use, and LOR. Furthermore, a negative effect was found for the personality variable Open-mindedness. These variables together explained 63 % (adjusted R²) of the variance in the sample, a large effect in individual differences research.


References
Abrahamsson, N. 2012. 'Age of onset and nativelike L2 ultimate attainment of morphosyntactic and phonetic intuition,' Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 34/2: 187-214. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263112000022 
Abrahamsson, N. and K. Hyltenstam. 2009. 'Age of L2 acquisition and degree of nativelikeness – listener perception vs linguistic scrutiny,' Language Learning 58/3: 249-306. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00507.x
Dollmann, J., I. Kogan and M. Weißmann. 2020. 'Speaking Accent-Free in L2 Beyond the Critical Period: The Compensatory Role of Individual Abilities and Opportunity Structures,' Applied Linguistics 41/5: 787–809. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amz029
Douglas Fir Group. 2016. 'A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world,' The Modern Language Journal 100 (Supplement 2016): 19-47. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12301 
Granena, G. and M. Long. 2013. 'Age of onset, length of residence, language aptitude, and ultimate attainment in three linguistic domains,' Second Language Research 29/3: 311-343. 
Hyltenstam, K. 2018. 'Second language ultimate attainment: Effects of maturation, exercise, and social/psychological factors,' Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 21/5: 921-923. doi:10.1017/S1366728918000172 
Lahmann, C., Steinkrauss, R., and M. S. Schmid. 2016. 'Factors affecting grammatical and lexical complexity of long‐term L2 speakers' oral proficiency, Language learning 66/2: 354-385.
Moyer, A. 2013. Foreign accent. The phenomenon of non-native speech. Cambridge University Press. 

The acquisition of meaning is vital for second language (L2) learning and use. While vocabulary research has long aimed at how to facilitate this acquisition, studies have typically focused on the learning of one meaning. However, most words in a language have multiple meanings (Hoshino, 2018), and research suggests that one of the challenges of L2 lexical development is learning the different meanings of words (Crossley et al., 2010; González-Fernández & Schmitt, 2020). It has been claimed that, due to their contextual nature, multiple meanings would benefit more from contextualized than decontextualized learning (Schmitt, 2014). Yet, few studies have examined the acquisition of multiple meanings in an L2 and how different instructional methods and types of meaning that a word can convey affects learning. Some research has investigated the acquisition of polysemy (meanings derived from the same origin) with a contextualized instructional approach (e.g., Verspoor & Lowie, 2003). However, it is still unclear how homonymous meanings of words (meanings derived from different origins) are learned by L2 learners compared to polysemous meanings, and how different instructional approaches (e.g., decontextualized flashcards) influence the learning of these various types of meaning.
The present study compares the deliberate learning of L2 homonymous and polysemous meanings under two instructional conditions. Following a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design, 100 Spanish-speaking EFL learners were divided into a control group (n = 30) and two experimental groups: contextualized learning group (n = 34), who encountered the target items in a contextual sentence, and decontextualized learning group (n = 36), who saw the target items in isolation. Participants in the experimental groups were taught, via flashcards, new, secondary meanings of 10 polysemous (e.g., chair) and 10 homonymous (e.g., toast) words (controlled for length, PoS, cognateness, and frequency) for which they already knew the most common meaning (e.g., 'a seat for one person' for chair, and 'bread that has been heated to make it brown' for toast), as evidenced by pre-tests. 10 primary meanings of unknown words (e.g., flesh as 'the soft tissue of the body') with the same variable manipulation were also included for comparison. Meaning-recall and meaning-recognition knowledge was tested immediately after the treatment and again one week later. Mixed-effect modelling analyses were used to compare the effect of learning condition (contextualized vs. decontextualized) and meaning type (polysemous, homonymous, and primary meaning), as well as to explore the effects of participants' proficiency level and intralexical factors on learning. The results revealed that both experimental groups experienced significant gains across all types of meaning (polysemous, homonymous, and primary meaning), although the decontextualized group showed an advantage in both the immediate and delayed post-tests. Importantly, the polysemous and homonymous meanings were learned and retained at a similar rate by both experimental groups, indicating that the etymological distinction between the two types of meaning may not be a determinant factor in the L2 acquisition of a word's multiple meanings. The methodological and pedagogical implications of the findings will be discussed in detail.