Monolingual and bilingual adults can learn foreign language words implicitly

Assessing word learning methods has important implications for classroom settings and developing language learning programs. Previous research has shown that adults can learn native-language words implicitly [1] and second-language (L2) words explicitly [2]. We tested whether adults could learn L2 words and attend to phonetic detail implicitly using cross-situational word learning, where participants make word-object associations by tracking word-object co-occurrences across learning trials. Results show that participants learned L2 words implicitly with above-chance accuracy, and that the amount of phonetic detail needed to distinguish words determined their accuracy levels. We discuss how these results compare to explicit L2 word learning.