2018 Friday Poster 6440

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

The development of the production effect in children aged 3 to 6 year olds
T. Zamuner, K. Boyce

Studies with children and adults have demonstrated that producing words during training benefits later recall of items, compared to items that are heard-only (Icht & Mama, 2015; Mama & Icht, 2016; MacLeod et al., 2010; Zamuner et al., 2016). Yet, studies have also found that the production effect is reversed when children and adults are tested on stimuli with non-native sound patterns (Kaushanskaya and Yoo, 2011), with non-words (Zamuner et al. 2017) and with a more challenging task (Baese-Berk and Samuel, 2016). Together, the effects of production have been argued to depend on task-, attentional, linguistic- and experience-related factors; however, little work has addressed this from a developmental perspective.

We adapted Icht and Mama’s study with 5-year-olds to examine the production effect with 3-4 year-olds (current n=24) and 5-6 year-olds (current n=20). Children were introduced to a stuffed (sleeping) dog that liked to learn words. There were three training conditions: Look (images presented silently), Heard (images presented and children heard prerecorded tokens), and Produced (images presented and children named the images aloud). There was a separate block for each training condition, and each block had 10 unique words. Blocks were counterbalanced. After training, the dog was awakened. Children were asked to teach the dog the words that they had learned.

The dependent variable was the mean number of recalled words, and data were analyzed using a 2×3 ANOVA with age (3-4 yrs, 5-6 yrs) and training (Heard, Look, Produced). There was a significant effect of age (F(1,42) = 6.88, p=.01): older children recalled more words, a significant effect of training (F(2,84) = 4.4, p=.02), and a significant interaction between training and age (F(2,84) = 3.3, p=.04), see Figure 1. The 3-4 year-olds showed no difference in the types of words that were recalled from the different conditions; however, the 5-6 year-olds recalled more words from the Look condition vs. Heard condition (p = .036), and the Look vs. Produced condition (p=.01). The difference between words recalled from the Heard vs. Production condition was not significant. Additional analyses were done to examine whether words recalled from the different training conditions increased with age in months. There was no significance between age and words recalled from the Heard condition (r=.12, p=.45), nor between age and words recalled from the Look condition (r=.05, p=.75); however, there was a significant positive correlation with age and the number of words recalled from the Produced condition (r=.48, p=.001), Figure 2. As children’s age increased, more words were recalled from the produced condition.

With our modified design, a new and different pattern of results on the production effect is emerging: the effect of production appears to be stronger with older children. This finding is relevant s it further demonstrates that the production effect is not constant across development. Instead, various factors interplay with the effects of production experience on word learning and memory (Vihman, 2017).

References

Baese-Berk, M. M., & Samuel, A. G. (2016). Listeners beware: Speech production may be bad for learning speech sounds. Journal of Memory and Language,89, 23-36.

Icht, M., & Mama, Y. (2015). The production effect in memory: a prominent mnemonic in children. Journal of Child Language, 42, 1102-1124.

Kaushanskaya, M. & Yoo, J. (2011). Rehearsal effects in adult word learning. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, 121-148.

MacLeod, C. M., Gopie, N., Hourihan, K. L., Neary, K. R. & Ozubko, J. D. (2010). The production effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(3), 671-685.

Mama, Y., & Icht, M. (2016). Auditioning the distinctiveness account: Expanding the production effect to the auditory modality reveals the superiority of writing over vocalising. Memory (Hove, England), 24(1), 98.

Vihman, M. M. (2017). In search of a learning model. British Journal of Psychology, 108(1), 40- 42.

Zamuner, T. S., Strahm, S., Morin-Lessard, E., & Page, M.P.A. (2017, on-line). Reverse production effect: Children recognize novel words better when they are heard rather than produced during training. Developmental Science.