USC Union PALM Psych Lab

Randy Lowell, Kaitlyn Pender, and Katherine Binder describe their experimental study into incidental vocabulary learning in their article, "Impact of Informative Context’s Meaning Consistency During Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition." They examine whether adults better process and remember unfamiliar words when they read them multiple times, and if those repeated encounters are in similar or different contexts (i.e. if the words mean the same thing in both sentences). The researchers find:

"Based on the results reported [in this article], context meaning consistency has an impact on the acquisition process during reading and on the nature of memory representations for novel words following those encounters in context" (p. 689).

This conclusion has many actionable implications for teachers, policy makers, and curriculum developers. See a few here, and then read the whole piece in :
https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rrq.295

To see more of Lowell's research, check out his lab at .PALM.PsycLab