By: Inas Essa
The “Repeat After Me” concept has been linked to the educational process for so long, as there has been a widely spread belief that repetition helps learners better learn and memorize newly learned words. However, recent research has shown that repeating new vocabulary right after hearing it is not the best way to learn, and may have a negative effect on learning, while silently listening to the new word or pausing before pronouncing it is a better option to reach good results.
Delaying Repetition Generates Better Results
The recent study carried out by the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language (BCBL) has built on previous research that found contradictory effects of simultaneous production on the capacity to learn new words. It also found that new word repetition can have negative effects on learning, especially when immediate. On the other hand, silently listening to the word or pausing between hearing and producing it can be more effective since delaying production alleviates its detrimental effect on word learning.
“In this study, we examined how immediately repeating a new word out loud or not repeating it can affect learning. In other words, what impact this study method actually has on the integration of a concept that we have just heard into our lexical system so that we can recognize it later,” says Efthymia Kapnoula, the BCBL researcher leading the project.
A 4-Second Pause Could Help
During the study that took place over two days, researchers analyzed the cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing in more than 300 volunteers and focused on a recently integrated word recognition in the mental lexicon. Each participant in the study learned 12 new words in one of four training conditions: Perception-Only, Immediate-Production, 2-second-Delayed-Production, and 4-second-Delayed-Production. After that, researchers tested how well the newly-learned words were embedded into the mental lexicon.
Results of the first day showed that repeating a new word immediately after hearing it disrupted learning compared to just hearing it, while this negative effect disappeared when participants paused for 4 seconds between hearing and producing each word. “In this first experiment, we saw that repetition had a slight positive effect at the beginning, but its final impact was negative,” Kapnoula says. She added that when a person repeats a word immediately after hearing it, cognitive resources are dedicated to preparing the production of the word, which means that they cannot be used to encode that word deeply. That said, when word production is delayed for a few seconds, this overlap is avoided, allowing deeper learning and encoding to take place.
These results not only help improve the understanding of the cognitive mechanisms involved in learning a new word, but they also shed light on the right way to effectively use repetition in education.
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