Differences between written and spoken input in learning new words

Abstract

We taught adult learners the meanings of rare words to test hypotheses about modality effects in learning word forms. These hypotheses are that (1) written (orthographic) training leads to a better representation of word form than phonological training, that (2) recognition memory for a word is partly dependent upon congruence between training and testing modality (written vs. spoken) but that (3) skilled learners are less dependent on the episodic context of training than are less skilled readers. These hypotheses were confirmed by results of a word recognition test following form-meaning training. We discuss these results in terms of an episodic account of word learning (Reichle & Perfetti, 2003) and variations in lexical quality (Perfetti & Hart, 2001) that can arise through differences in code generation during learning.