Learning Effects Of Rote Memorization And Contextual Word Learning:A Semantic Priming Study

It has been found that Event-Related Potential effects to novel words were indistinguishable from real words when novel words were learned in high constraint sentences in more and more studies in neuroelectrophysiology(Misse,Fornells &Munte,2007;Borovsky,Kutas & Elman,2010;2012;Chen,Ma,Liang & Liu,2017),which demonstrated that there was a rapid mental process that was sensitive to novel word usage.In other words,L2 learners can rapidly acquire word meaning through experience of exposures in high quality sentence contexts.However,is there also a immediate learning mechanism to L2 acquisition? Can it be testified through behavioral experiments? Here the author compared the effects of pseudowords on the procession of real words under two conditions of contextual learning and rote memorization by using the semantic priming paradigm so as to discuss whether there exists a rapid learning of semantic meaning in the vocabulary acquisition of L2.By designed elaborately the learning materials of the two vocabulary cognitive strategies and lexical decision tasks in semantic priming experiment,the author explored the following main questions: in the process of vocabulary acquisition,which strategy would have better learning effects? Which strategy would have more impacts on learners' mental lexicon? Which strategy was more helpful for vocabulary learning?In addition,semantic relatedness effect on semantic priming was also explored.Participants were randomly divided into two groups.The participants trained by rote memorization learned the pseudo-words and their accordingly designed interpretations or definitions,whereas the participants trained by contextual learning learned the meaning of pseudo-words embedded in three sentences with high constrained context.Participants spent the same amount of time learning every pseudo-word.After finishing the learning tasks,subsequently and quickly,the participants completed the lexical decision tasks(i.e.participants would see two words occurring on the computer screen successively and would be asked to decide whether the second word as a target was a real word or not).The results showed that:(1)The mean response accuracy and mean reaction time of contextual word learningwere higher than those of rote memorization;(2)Mean response latency on semantically related prime-target pairs was faster than on semantically unrelated prime-target pairs.And in term of semantic types,there was different semantic priming effects between superordinate and hyponymy.Participants were significantly faster when presented with superordinate–hyponym prime-target pairs than with hyponym–superordinate prime-target pairs.With these indicators of immediate learning effects in the lexical decision tasks,the author concluded that,the speed to retrieve the acquired words of contextual learning was faster than that of rote memorization,which meant contextual word learning would make more impacts on the mental lexicon in implicit memory.