The role of lag effect in distributed practice on learning novel vocabulary

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the lag effects in two different versions of distributed practice on learning novel language vocabulary.

Method

Forty-four healthy monolingual English-speaking participants were randomly assigned to two versions of distributed practice. The two versions of distributed practice were created by altering the temporal lag between the practice sessions. Participants in both groups completed a similar practice regimen wherein they practiced 30 French occupations five times each for a total of 150 times. The pre/post-design employed in this experiment involved participants completing baseline, immediate, and delayed retention tests. The outcome measures included a comprehensive multiple-choice test and a written expression task.

Results

The findings from the comprehensive and expressive tasks indicated that the learning performance of participants across both groups was better during the immediate retention test compared to the delayed retention test. With regard to the group, participants assigned to the condensed version of distributed practice demonstrated superior learning of the novel vocabulary over participants assigned to the extended version of distributed practice.

Conclusion

The findings indicate that an increased temporal lag between the practice sessions results in a “non-monotonic function,” wherein the learning continues to improve until an optimal lag, after which the learning declines as the lag continues to increase. This line of research will have a substantive impact on service-delivery models in speech-language pathology.

Keywords:

• Language learning
• practice
• principles of motor learning
• service delivery

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thanks Ms. Eliza Hale for her assistance with the pilot data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 As there were only three response options for each of the five questions presented for the comprehension task during baseline, immediate, and delayed retention phases, there was a probability of 33.3% for the participants to get each of their responses correct.

2 To determine if the participants guessed their responses, we conducted a null hypothesis statistical testing using Chi-square statistics with degrees of freedom being 2.

3 The results revealed that the probability for the participants to guess their responses was <0.05 during each of the baseline, immediate retention, and delayed retention phases.