Does narrator variability facilitate incidental word learning in the classroom?

José Luis Tapia,Francisco Rocabado,Eva Rosa,Manuel Perea,Marta Vergara-Martínez

doi:10.3758/s13421-021-01228-4

José Luis Tapia, Francisco Rocabado + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01228-4

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Abstract

Recent studies have revealed that presenting novel words across various contexts (i.e., contextual diversity) helps to consolidate the meaning of these words both in adults and children. This effect has been typically explained in terms of semantic distinctiveness (e.g., Semantic Distinctiveness Model, Jones et al., Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66(2), 115, 2012). However, the relative influence of other, non-semantic, elements of the context is still unclear. In this study, we examined whether incidental learning of new words in children was facilitated when the words were uttered by several individuals rather than when they were uttered by the same individual. In the learning phase, the to-be-learned words were presented through audible fables recorded either by the same voice (low diversity) or by different voices (high diversity). Subsequently, word learning was assessed through two orthographic and semantic integration tasks. Results showed that words uttered by different voices were learned better than those uttered by the same voice. Thus, the benefits of contextual diversity in word learning extend beyond semantic differences among contexts; they also benefit from perceptual differences among contexts.

Highlights

In an influential study, Adelman et al (2006) found that contextual diversity, defined as the number of different documents in which a word appears, was the strongest facilitative predictor of response times in word-naming and lexical-decision tasks
We investigated whether contextual diversity – operationalized in terms of narrator diversity – had a facilitative effect in the incidental acquisition of novel words by Grade 3 children in the classroom
Results from the two tasks showed that novel words presented in fables uttered by different narrators were learned better than novel words presented in fables uttered by the same narrator

Summary

Introduction

In an influential study, Adelman et al (2006) found that contextual diversity, defined as the number of different documents in which a word appears, was the strongest facilitative predictor of response times (even more than word-frequency) in word-naming and lexical-decision tasks. This finding has been replicated numerous times in word-recognition tasks (e.g., Brysbaert et al, 2012; Cai & Brysbaert, 2010; Dimitropoulou et al, 2010; Duchon et al, 2013; Keuleers et al, 2010; Soares et al, 2015), and during sentence reading (e.g., Chen et al, 2017; Pagán & Nation, 2019; Plummer et al, 2014). Participants viewed slides that consisted of an image and a three-word sentence that

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