This study examines the effect of typographic enhancement on L2 learners’ intake of multiword units from reading. EFL learners read texts in one of three versions: (1) with many multiword units underlined; (2) with half of these multiword units underlined; and (3) without any underlining. The learners were subsequently asked to identify the multiword units they remembered encountering in the texts. The purpose of the text version in which only half of the target units were underlined was to explore whether enhancement of a small number of word strings in a text also stimulates intake of others from that text. As expected, enhanced multiword units were remembered better than unenhanced ones, but there was no evidence that the benefit extended beyond the enhanced items.

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If known words can be defined psycholinguistically as ‘form–meaning mappings’, the present article investigates whether prompting learners to evaluate whether the form of a new second language (L2) word fits its meaning generates ‘mapping elaborations’ that aid recall. Thirty Dutch-speaking upper-intermediate learners of English were invited to rate and motivate the degree of congruency they perceived between the form and meaning of 14 novel L2 words. Their ability to recall the form and the meaning of the target words was measured in an unannounced post-test. Recall was found to be positively related to the number of learner-generated mapping elaborations triggered by the task. Elaborations of a sound–symbolic nature appeared particularly useful for rendering the form of new words memorable.

The majority of L2 vocabulary studies concentrate on learning word meaning and provide learners with opportunities for semantic elaboration (i.e., focus on word meaning). However, in initial vocabulary learning, engaging in structural elaboration (i.e., focus on word form) with a view to acquiring L2 word form is equally important. The present contextual word-learning study aims to compare the effects of an increased attention to form condition and an increased attention to meaning condition. Native speakers of Dutch (N = 50) learned new English vocabulary in a meaning-inferencing condition, which focused their attention on word meaning, and a word-writing condition, which prompted the learners to focus on word form. The results demonstrate that the word-writing condition advanced both form recall and meaning recall to a greater extent than the meaning-inferencing condition. We conclude that word writing benefits initial word learning more than meaning inferencing in a contextual word-learning situation.

In this paper, we consider the problem of detecting clustered microcalcification in digitized mammograms using new wavelets with a high Sobolev regularity index. We experimentally assess the superiority of the new wavelets when compared with the classical ones.