Junttila Katja, Ylinen Sari
Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
CICERO Learning, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Front Psychol. 2020 May 29;11:1108. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01108. eCollection 2020.
To determine the best techniques to teach children foreign words, we compared the effectiveness of four different learning tasks on their foreign-word learning (i.e., learning word forms and word meanings). The tasks included incidental learning, intentional learning with production, intentional learning without production, and cross-situational statistical learning. We also analyzed whether children's age and cognitive skills correlate with the learning of word forms and word meanings. Forty-four 5-8-year-old children participated in the study. The results reveal that the children were able to learn the correct word forms from all four tasks and no differences emerged between the effectiveness of the tasks on the learning of word-forms. The children also learned the word meanings with all four tasks, yet the intentional task with production was more effective than the incidental task. This suggests that the ability of children to learn foreign words benefited from them knowing that they were supposed to learn new words and producing them aloud while training. The age of the children correlated with their learning results for word forms and meanings on the intentional task without production. The older children learned more effectively than the younger children in this task. Children's phonological processing skills were correlated with learning the word meanings from the incidental task, suggesting that children with better phonological skills were able to benefit from incidental learning more than children with poorer phonological skills. Altogether, the results suggest that children's foreign-language learning benefits from intentional training with speech production regardless of their age or cognitive skills.
为了确定教授儿童外语单词的最佳方法，我们比较了四种不同学习任务在儿童外语单词学习（即学习单词形式和词义）方面的效果。这些任务包括附带学习、有产出的有意学习、无产出的有意学习以及跨情境统计学习。我们还分析了儿童的年龄和认知技能是否与单词形式和词义的学习相关。44名5至8岁的儿童参与了这项研究。结果显示，儿童能够从所有四项任务中学习到正确的单词形式，并且在单词形式学习任务的效果方面没有出现差异。儿童也通过所有四项任务学习到了词义，然而有产出的有意任务比附带任务更有效。这表明儿童学习外语单词的能力受益于他们知道自己应该学习新单词并在训练时大声说出这些单词。儿童的年龄与他们在无产出的有意任务中单词形式和词义的学习结果相关。在这项任务中，年龄较大的儿童比年龄较小的儿童学习更有效。儿童的语音处理技能与从附带任务中学习词义相关，这表明语音技能较好的儿童比语音技能较差的儿童能从附带学习中受益更多。总之，结果表明儿童的外语学习受益于有言语产出的有意训练，无论他们的年龄或认知技能如何。
