Effect of Word Exposure Frequency on Chinese Advanced EFL Learners’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Abstract

The present study explores the effect of word exposure frequency on Chinese advanced EFL learners’ incidental acquisition of three aspects of word knowledge (i.e., word form, word class and word meaning). The participants were 20 Chinese English postgraduates who read two chapters of an original English novel and took four vocabulary tests. The target words were 20 pseudo-words created to replace the words that naturally occurred from one to twenty times in the text. The results show that word exposure frequency has a significant effect on IVA through reading, exerting the strongest effect on word form recognition and the weakest on word meaning recall. The study also finds that seven is the threshold value for significant word gain growth and that local word frequency also influences learners’ IVA.