How can networked computing promote L2 vocabulary growth? Some ways seem uncontroversial. Web-linked multimedia computing can do what other media have always done only moreso, for example expanding the quantity, variety, bandwidth and accessibility of contexts that learners will encounter new words in. A more controversial question is whether computing can provide new or different learning opportunities from traditional media. I will argue that it can, in one specific area: provision of principled support for memory-intensive learning processes as these undergo automatization. Three specific examples from my own research include contextual inference from text, lexical resource use while reading, and post-basic vocabulary expansion.