Pruss Shimon, Karni Avi, Prior Anat
Department of Learning Disabilities, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, 199 Abba Hushi Blvd., Haifa, Israel.
Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Mar 19. doi: 10.3758/s13423-025-02674-w.
Encoding information in reference to the self leads to improved memory, a phenomenon termed the self-reference effect. Learning vocabulary in a foreign language (L2) is a challenging memory task, because learning thousands of words is necessary to achieve listening and reading comprehension. The current study examined the efficacy of self-reference encoding for L2 vocabulary learning. In Experiment 1, native Hebrew speakers learned rare English words with a self-reference task and a control condition of translation repetition. In Experiment 2, participants learned with the same self-reference task and a control task of semantic processing. Across both experiments, memory was higher in the self-reference condition in both an immediate and a delayed test one week later. Thus, self-reference might be adopted as a learning tool in L2 vocabulary learning. Further, we demonstrate the contribution of self-reference to learning new information, going beyond previous demonstration of its positive impact on episodic encoding of known information.
参照自我来编码信息会提高记忆力，这一现象被称为自我参照效应。学习外语（第二语言，L2）词汇是一项具有挑战性的记忆任务，因为要实现听力和阅读理解就需要学习数千个单词。当前的研究考察了自我参照编码对第二语言词汇学习的效果。在实验1中，以希伯来语为母语的人通过自我参照任务和翻译重复的控制条件来学习罕见的英语单词。在实验2中，参与者通过相同的自我参照任务和语义处理的控制任务来学习。在两个实验中，无论是在即时测试还是在一周后的延迟测试中，自我参照条件下的记忆力都更高。因此，自我参照可能被用作第二语言词汇学习的一种学习工具。此外，我们证明了自我参照对学习新信息的贡献，这超越了以往关于其对已知信息的情景编码有积极影响的证明。
