This article presents the concept development, research programming, and learning design of a lexical processing web application, Virtual Vocabulary, which was developed using theories in both cognitive psychology and second language acquisition (SLA). It is being tested with first-year students of German at the University of Victoria in Canada, specifically looking at intervals and time-sets in a large study on spaced retrieval. The findings are being used to refine language-learning software for second language lexical acquisition. (Contains 2 tables and 3 figures.)