Paired-associate versus cross-situational: How do verbal working memory and word familiarity affect word learning?

Word learning is one of the first steps into language, and vocabulary knowledge predicts reading, speaking, and writing ability. There are several pathways to word learning and little is known about how they differ. Previous research has investigated paired-associate (PAL) and cross-situational word learning (CSWL) separately, limiting the understanding of how the learning process compares across the two. In PAL, the roles of word familiarity and working memory have been thoroughly examined, but these same factors have received very little attention in CSWL. We randomly assigned 126 monolingual adults to PAL or CSWL. In each task, names of 12 novel objects were learned (six familiar words, six unfamiliar words). Logistic mixed-effects models examined whether word-learning paradigm, word type and working memory (measured with a backward digit-span task) predicted learning. Results suggest better learning performance in PAL and on familiar words. Working memory predicted word learning across paradigms, but no interactions were found between any of the predictors. This suggests that PAL is easier than CSWL, likely because of reduced ambiguity between the word and the referent, but that learning across both paradigms is equally enhanced by word familiarity, and similarly supported by working memory.