Beyond form–meaning: Investigating the potential and limits of captioned video in building declarative and automatized vocabulary knowledge

The present study tested the hypothesis that phonological vocabulary knowledge consists of declarative and automatized dimensions, which develop at different rates. Chinese students of English as a foreign language completed three tasks (recognition, recall, and lexicosemantic judgements) to assess learning gains of 18 multiword expressions before and after short intentional audiovisual training. The results showed that (1) task effects were minor at the outset due to participants’ limited prior knowledge of target items, (2) training facilitated greater gains in the declarative than in the automatized dimension, and (3) clearer task effects (declarative > automatized knowledge) emerged following training. These findings provide longitudinal support for the developmental trajectories proposed by the declarative-automatized model of phonological vocabulary acquisition.