What Is Learned under Difficult Conditions Is Hard to Forget: Contextual Interference Effects in Foreign Vocabulary Acquisition, Retention, and Transfer
Journal of Memory and Language, (February 2002)Abstract
In two experiments, participants were given, in an initial session, three trials of training on French-English vocabulary pairs and then were tested on these pairs. In a second session 1 week later, they were retested and then retrained on the same pairs. Both translation directions were employed (English-French and French-English). In Experiment 1, the vocabulary pairs were either blocked by category or mixed, and in Experiment 2, participants were pretrained on half of the French words before vocabulary learning. There was enhanced savings during relearning when initial learning involved the more difficult English-French translation direction or no pretraining on French words. Further, when learning involved the more difficult English-French translation direction or mixed pairs, forgetting across the 1-week delay was reduced.