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The spacing effect refers to the learning benefit that comes from separating repeated study of target items by time or by other items. A prominent proposed explanation for this effect states that repeated exposures that occur closely together may not engage full attentional processing due to residual activation of the previous exposure and also, in an intentional learning context, due to a sense of familiarity that may result in strategic allocation of less study time to an item in massed repetitions. The present study used eye-tracking methodology to investigate the effects of temporal distribution of repeated exposures to novel second language words on attentional processing and learning of these words under intentional learning instructions. Adult native speakers of English read Finnish words embedded in English sentence contexts under massed and spaced conditions. The results showed that (a) massed repeated exposures received less attentional processing than spaced repeated exposures; (b) target words were better remembered in the spaced condition; and (c) attention was a significant mediator of the obtained spacing effect, in line with the predictions of the deficient processing account of the spacing effect. Implications for vocabulary learning are discussed.
