AbstractThis chapter reports on a study that addresses the role of syntactic prominence,
that is, the perceived importance of sentence constituents, in L1 and L2 incidental
vocabulary acquisition. In a self-paced reading study with 80 native German
speakers and 64 advanced learners of German, we explored the initial stages of
vocabulary acquisition. The results revealed an acquisition advantage for the
meanings of new words that appeared as subjects in main clauses compared to
those that appeared as objects in subordinate clauses in L2, but not in L1. We
argue that the acquisition advantage for words with high syntactic prominence
in L2 can be attributed to a higher allocation of the readers’ attention to prominent
sentence constituents. L1 participants did not display this benefit because
their high linguistic competence allowed sufficient processing of both subject and
object, main and subordinate clauses. The findings demonstrate that syntactic
prominence has, so far, been an overlooked factor in incidental vocabulary acquisition,
which, however, has important implications for teaching material design
and vocabulary presentation.
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