Does hearing several speakers reduce foreign word learning?

Abstract

Learning spoken word forms is a vital part of second language learning, and CALL lends itself well to this training. Not enough is known, however, about how auditory variation across speech tokens may affect receptive word learning. To find out, 144 Thai university students with no knowledge of the Patani Malay language learned 24 foreign words in a CALL program for receptive vocabulary learning. Word meanings were presented in line drawings, and their spoken forms presented by either one or three Patani Malay speakers. Several other variables were included for control. Logistic regressions with and without adjustment by other factors suggested learners recognized somewhat fewer word meanings when trained with three Patani Malay speakers, especially under varied image conditions. This finding implies fragile initial auditory representations, and limited processing resources. The application of current results and their interpretation to CALL may be to limit sources of variation that would otherwise direct attention away from word forms.

Keywords:

• CALL
• vocabulary learning
• second language
• speech
• nouns
• images

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Faculty of Psychology at Chulalongkorn University for research costs and additional financial support; Miles Tufft, MSc, and three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback on prior versions of this paper; my research assistants; and the assistance and support of my wife Watanee Ludington.

Disclosure statement

The author declares no conflicts of interest, either personal or institutional, in the publication of this research.

Notes

1. Excluding the 40 participants who reported fewer than 10 words in the experiment language did not dramatically alter the pattern of effects or their significance.

2. One exception was the Thai word for “baby” which was translated as “child”. Part way through data collection this mistake was corrected. Ratings for the wrong word were discarded. As a result, “baby” was rated by fewer participants.

3. The null finding of seating location contrasts with Perkins and Wieman (2005) who found, using an assigned seating location in a lecture room, that greater proximity to the front of the classroom positively affected students’ performance. The null finding of group size stands in contrast to Mosteller (1995) who found that smaller classroom sizes (with greater teacher-to-student ratios) were more conducive to learning, and contrasts with the finding that one-on-one attention facilitates student engagement (Blatchford, Basset, & Brown, 2011). It seems unlikely that seating location or class size matter to CALL, as long as these do not cause perceptual difficulties, when human–computer interaction is unavailable.

4. Block and block order were accidentally confounded. To disentangle their effects, block order was reversed for 19 of 48 participants tested in a later study (data not included here). After adjustment for one another, the effect of block approached significance in that study (p = .06), but block order did not (p = .84). Assuming a constant block order effect across separate studies with the same stimuli, it was likely that no block order effect existed in the current study, and therefore the effect of block was probably a legitimate effect (independent of block order).

5. In logistic models, interaction terms act as if they mediate involved terms, but really they change how those terms should be interpreted; with an interaction term in the model, ORs multiply by the interaction term to find simple effects. Thus, the OR of speakers at the level of three images would be .80 × .74 = .59, and the OR of images at the level of three speakers would be 1.10 × .74 = .81. As these ORs are below 1, we see both simple effects are negative. The significance of these effects may be figured in post hoc testing with segments of the data.

6. For example, learners could interpret an image as “cloudy” in a lesson on weather, but “clouds” in a lesson on object names.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Jason Darryl Ludington

Jason D. Ludington is a lecturer in the Faculty of Psychology, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2012. His current research involves cognitive aspects of language processing, and neural correlates of boredom.