Psycholinguistic Determinants of Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning

This paper reviews the psycholinguistic factors that affect ease of learning of foreign language (FL) vocabulary and investigates their role in 47 students' learning of German under Repetition, Keyword or “Own” strategy conditions. Native‐to‐foreign learning is shown to be easier the more the FL words conform to the phonological (0.40< r <0.63; p <.01) and orthographic (0.28< r <0.45; .05< p <.01) patterns of the native language. However, these relationships are less pronounced (not significant) in foreign‐to‐native learning. The part of speech (0.44< r <0.64; p <.01) and the imageability (0.37< r <0.53; .05< p <.01) of the concept are strong determinants of learnability, suggesting an important influence of meaningfulness. Keyword effectiveness, particularly in the case of receptive learning, is influenced by the part of speech and imageability of the keyword. But keywords must also share considerable acoustic similarity with their foreign words to be effective reminders in productive learning( r =0.61; p <.01). Otherwise learners must practice these novel phonotactic and orthographic patterns to consolidate them.