Incidental Learning of Word Stress with Captioned Authentic Videos: The Effect of Repetition

Recent technological advances and access to authentic input have promoted autonomous and incidental target language (TL) vocabulary learning. Very few studies, however, have so far put focus on both incidental learning of the word stress aspect of potentially new lexis and the influence of the repetition variable on this process, while viewing authentic videos. Similarly, there is very limited research on determining the critical number of repetitions needed to effectively learn word stress aspect of potentially new vocabulary by using authentic videos with captions. To address these three issues, Spanish participants from an incidental learning group were asked to watch 5 hours of authentic TV documentary with English captions, where eleven target words had from 2 to 112 repetitions. The general results revealed an apparent better performance of the incidental group in comparison to the control one. Nevertheless, a more detailed statistical analysis of the results for each target word has proven to be not significant. Furthermore, no statistically significant correlation between the increase in the number of repetitions and successful learning of the word stress was detected and, as a consequence, it was unfortunately impossible to determine the critical number of repetitions for successful incidental acquisition of the word stress aspect of new lexis while viewing authentic videos.