Effects On Vocabulary Acquisition Of Teaching New Words In Semantic Sets Versus Semantically Unrelated Sets

This paper reports on an experiment which investigated the effect on vocabularyacquisition of teaching new words in semantically related sets versus semanticallyunrelated sets. Participates were taught32concrete nouns of Chinese from4semanticsets: vegetables, household appliances, animals, body parts in stories that were eithersemantically related (one set per story) or semantically unrelated (four sets per story).They then completed an immediate test which including recall task and recognitiontask after finishing learning per story. Six days later, there was a delayed test whichalso including recall task and recognition task. The results indicate that teachingvocabulary in semantically unrelated sets promotes learning:1) participates ofsemantically unrelated group did better than their counterparts on recognition task ofthe immediate and delayed tests;2) participates of semantically unrelated group didbetter than their counterparts on recall task of the tests, especially the immediate test.