Finding residual lexical knowledge: The “Savings” approach to testing vocabulary

Abstract

In this article we report on a series of experiments that have been carried out to apply the savings paradigm to learning words in a foreign language. In the experiments we compared acquisition success rates of newly acquired (foreign language) words versus words students of a foreign language are likely to have acquired at some point in the past in order to determine the existence and accessibility of residual vocabulary knowledge. The results show that subjects, learners of German in the U.S. and learners of French in the Netherlands, were better at relearning and retaining words they knew at some point but seemed to have forgotten than at learning completely new vocabulary both right after learning and in a delayed post-test.