Page 9 - ELG2109 Sep Issue 477

NEWS

Learning strange new words boosts long-term vocabulary

By Gillian Ragsdale One group was given a list of
Learning words that are similar words with letter patterns similar
to the learner’s native language to English, eg, ‘haner’, meaning
is easier in the short term, but ‘bride’ while the other group had PHOTO FROM PEXELS.COM
learning less-familiar words pays less-familiar looking and sounding
off over the longer term, according words, eg, ‘vobaf’, meaning ‘cloud’.
to a study from Northwestern After learning the new words,
University and the University of the students were tested by giving
Kansas in the US. them the meanings and asking
When learning any new them to supply the new word.
language, some words may seem Unsurprisingly, students learning
familiar due to the pattern of the the more familiar words scored
letters and/or the sound being significantly higher on this test.
similar to words in the student’s Two weeks later, the students
native language. Some of these were given new lists of 48 words.
are ‘false friends’, such as Rat in For each group, the new list of
German, which means ‘advice’. words was related to the first list
Learners seem to pick up these by making letter substitutions, eg, to English for both groups, so to learn less-familiar vocabulary,
familiar words more easily, but does ‘hajer’ and ‘tobaf’. any advantage could not be due they will reap the later benefit of
this enable or interfere with long- This time when the students to direct similarity to English for being able to acquire addtional
term vocabulary acquisition? were tested, there was no one group compared to the other vocabulary more easily.
The US team put this to the test difference in scores between the (unlike the first test scores).
by recruiting 38 English-speaking two groups. But this does not In the second test, the REFERENCE
university students to learn sets mean that there was no difference students who had learned the n Marian V, Bartolotti J, van den Berg
of pseudowords from computer- in how successful the two initially unfamiliar words were A and Hayakawa S (2021) Costs and
generated languages. The students groups were in learning the new significantly more likely to recall Benefits of Native Language Similarity
were divided into two groups and vocabulary overall. the second set of related words. for Non-native Word Learning.
each group was given a list of 48 In the second lists, the words This suggests that if students pay Frontiers in Psychology 12:651506.
five-letter words to learn. were selected to be equally similar the initial cost in terms of effort doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.651506

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