Effects of Subvocal Rehearsal On Word Learning In Monolingual and Bilingual Adults

Su, Jocelyn

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Effects of Subvocal Rehearsal On Word Learning In Monolingual and Bilingual Adults 公开 Deposited

Analytics

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/zc77sr059

Abstract

The purpose of this current study was to examine whether subvocal rehearsal can facilitate fast mapping of novel words and determine whether there are differences in the efficacy of subvocal rehearsal for monolingual and bilingual individuals. Participants were 21 monolingual English-speaking young adults and 15 Mandarin-English bilingual young adults. The monolingual and bilingual participants were randomly assigned to three different rehearsal groups: subvocal, vocal, and control. At beginning of the study, the participants in the subvocal and vocal groups were auditorily exposed to 16 novel words 15 times in three different languages: English, Mandarin, and Korean. The vocal group was required to repeat after each model while the subvocal group was asked to repeat each word silently. The control group did not receive any exposure to the novel words. All participants then completed the fast mapping task. During the fast mapping task, each participant was randomly presented 4 novel words and their referent images 2 times. To measure their fast mapping skills, participants were asked to do comprehension (accuracy and reaction time) and production (accuracy) tasks. Findings suggest that participants in the subvocal rehearsal group were significantly faster than the other groups in the comprehension probe. Additionally, a bilingual advantage was observed in the production probes. The results of the current study support further investigation into the efficacy of subvocal rehearsal as a word learning tool. Clinical implications are discussed.

Word count: 230

Keywords: Subvocal rehearsal, fast mapping, bilingual advantage

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