Visible or Invisible Links: Does the Highlighting of Hyperlinks Affect Incidental Vocabulary Learning, Text Comprehension, and the Reading Process?

This article investigates how the signaling-mode of electronic glosses in online texts (i.e., presented digitally on a computer screen) influences the user's reading process, incidental vocabulary learning, and text comprehension. Indeed, does the fact that hyperlinks with dictionary definitions are visible (i.e., highlighted) or invisible affect the foreign language learner's look-up behaviour and as a consequence the possible learning outcome? Furthermore, the article addresses the question whether the type of reading task (general vs. specific) affects the learner's use of these links and the amount and quality of the language learned. The article discusses empirical research conducted in an attempt to address these questions. The results indicate that when reading a text with highlighted hyperlinks, readers are significantly more willing to consult the gloss. However, this increased clicking does not slow down the reading process, does not affect text comprehension, and does not increase the vocabulary learned incidentally. The reading task does not seem to alter the clicking behaviour of the students but seems to influence the reader's vocabulary learning: A content-oriented reading task decreases the reader's attention for vocabulary.