You won’t guess that: On the limited benefits of guessing when learning a foreign language

Ewa Butowska,Katarzyna Zawadzka,Maciej Hanczakowski

doi:10.3758/s13421-021-01254-2

Ewa Butowska, Katarzyna Zawadzka + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01254-2

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Abstract

Guessing the meaning of a foreign word before being presented with the right answer benefits recognition performance for the translation compared to reading the full translation outright. However, guessing does not increase memory for the foreign-word-to-translation associations, which is crucial for language acquisition. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether this disadvantage of guessing for performance in cued-recall tests would be eliminated if a restudy phase was added. In Experiments 1–3, we consistently demonstrated that guessing resulted in lower cued-recall performance compared to reading, both before and after restudy. Even for items for which participants successfully recalled their initial guesses on the cued-recall test, accuracy levels did not exceed those from the reading condition. In Experiment 4, we aimed to generalize our findings concerning restudy to a different set of materials – weakly associated word pairs. Even though this time guessing led to better performance than reading, consistent with previous studies, this guessing benefit was not moderated by adding a restudy phase. Our results thus underscore the importance of the initial learning phase for future learning and retention, while undermining the usefulness of the learning-through-guessing strategy for acquiring foreign language vocabulary.

Highlights

A question of how to optimize one’s learning has been of interest to researchers for decades (e.g., Atkinson, 1972)
The results suggest that guessing, which almost always leads to errors, is superior to reading in terms of the final cued-recall test performance
For guessing to benefit memory, the target word must be conceptually related to the cue, at least when a memory test relying on cue-target associations is used

Summary

Introduction

A question of how to optimize one’s learning has been of interest to researchers for decades (e.g., Atkinson, 1972). One learning technique that holds promise of making learning more effective is attempting to guess the answer to a question before being provided with the correct answer in the form of feedback. Kornell et al (2009) developed a paradigm, using lists of related word pairs as study materials, that demonstrates the effectiveness of guessing in supporting learning. While the basic paradigm of Kornell et al (2009) reveals robust and replicable benefits of guessing, a number of boundary conditions for this effect have been described. One of these concerns the relationship within the studied material. Participants learned Euskara-English translations as well as rare English words paired with their more common meanings

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