By Megan Sumeracki

‘It takes a village’ is a phrase that seems to ring true for me, both in my personal life and as an academic. I strongly believe that bidirectional communication among teachers and researchers is key, and I love to engage in these conversations and use those to help decide on content for the blog. Whenever we talk with teachers and other educators about evidence-based learning strategies, one of the common questions that comes up is, does it work for all learners? I also received an email from a reader recently asking about applying the evidence-based strategies that we talk about on the website to learning language. At the same time, a Professor of Spanish and Language Learning Strategies Coach sent an email about a new blog they are launching, The Language Learning Strategies for All Blog, and asked if I would be willing to contribute. So, I was so excited when I realized I could write about a relatively recent paper by Laurence Leonard and colleagues (1) and in doing so address all these questions! Today’s blog post is being published both here on our Learning Scientists Blog, and on the Language Learning Strategies for All Blog. Check it out!

Retrieval practice is a powerful learning strategy for vocabulary learning. For those who aren’t familiar, retrieval practice is bringing information to mind from memory. For example, if I now ask you to remember the title of this blog post, and you can write it out without looking at the top of the page, you just used retrieval practice to help learn the title! (A useless thing to remember, but it is retrieval practice nonetheless.)

But is retrieval practice mostly just effective for individuals who are neurotypical? Leonard and colleagues (1) start to answer this question by studying preschool-aged children (about 4-6 years of age) with developmental language disorder (DLD). Children with DLD show a deficit in language ability. They often have weaker vocabulary skills compared to peers without DLD, and these differences can persist into adulthood. Will retrieval practice better help young children with DLD learn new vocabulary?

The Experiment:

The children in the experiment (participants)

There were 14 children with DLD and 13 typically developing peers in the experiment. (This may seem like a small sample; that is common for experiments with very specific participation criteria, and these effects have been replicated in a few other recent papers as well; 2-4). The children with DLD were either already enrolled in language intervention or had been referred.

The novel words the children learned (materials)

The children learned novel adjectives in the experiment. The “novel adjectives” weren’t actually real words—cognitive psychologists sometimes do this to make absolutely sure the content being learned is brand new to the learner. These novel adjectives were presented along with illustrations, demonstrating that the new word referred to a specific attribute. For example, “zogi” was presented with both a truck and a cow that contained many spikes all over it.

How the children learned (procedure)

First, the children saw the novel words along with the two pictures. They also heard the word. For example, they would learn zogi by seeing the word and the images of the truck and the cow above, and then hearing “Look! These are very zogi”.

Then, after they were exposed to all the words, learning continued in two conditions.

• In the studying condition, the children saw one of the pictures and heard three sentences using the adjective, for example “This cow is really zogi”.

• In the retrieval practice condition, the children saw one of the pictures and were asked to say the word. For example, they saw the cow and heard, “Tell me about the cow. The cow is very___”. The children were supposed to say “zogi”. Then, they studied by seeing the word and picture together and hearing the sentence.

The researchers took care to equate exposure across the two conditions, and to counterbalance the materials and conditions. This just means that they made sure any differences in learning are not due to time spent learning the words, specific pictures, or anything specific about the words (you can learn more about research methods concepts in this post if you are interested). Therefore, if the results show differences in learning, we know it is because of the learning strategy used, studying or retrieval practice.

How the children’s learning was measured (procedure)

Learning was measured five minutes and one week after learning. The children were tested using the pictures they already saw (e.g., the zogi truck, the zogi cow) and on new pictures (e.g., a zogi table shown below).

Sometimes their recall was tested, and they were asked to produce the word. For example, “Tell me about the truck. The truck is very___” or “Tell me about the table. The table is very___” and they needed to finish the sentence. Sometimes they were tested with multiple-choice; they were shown four pictures and were asked to point to which one was one the adjective (e.g., show me the one that is zogi).

The Results:

Overall, the results showed that retrieval practice was better for learning the novel adjectives than studying, for both groups of children. Retrieval practice also led to better generalization; the children were better at recognizing new objects that illustrated the adjective when they learned the word with retrieval practice rather than studying. These effects held across time, too.

The sample size in this experiment was small, but these effects have been generally replicated by this research group across a few experiments (2-4). Thus retrieval practice seems to be an effective strategy that could be implemented with teachers, parents, or those who work with children during language intervention. While more research on retrieval practice with more diverse samples is welcomed, overall, looking at the vast research base we do have, it seems like retrieval practice is a powerful strategy for many types of individuals.

If you liked this post, you may be interested in this one: Retrieval Practice Improves Learning, but Will it Help ALL of my Students?

References:

 (1) Leonard, L. B., Deevy, P., Karpicke, J. D., Christ, S., Weber, C., Kueser, J. B., & Haebig, E. (2019). Adjective learning in young typically developing children and children with developmental language disorder: A retrieval-based approach. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 62(12), 4433-4449. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_JSLHR-L-19-0221

(2) Leonard, L. B., Karpicke, J. D., Deevy, P., Weber, C., Christ, S., & Haebig, E., Souto, S., Kueser, J. B., & Krok, W. (2019). Retrieval-based word learning in young typically developing children and children with developmental language disorder I: The benefits of repeated retrieval. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 62(4), 932-943. https://doi.org/10.1044/2018_JSLHR-L-18-0070

(3) Leonard, L. B., Deevy, P., Karpicke, J. D., Christ, S. L., & Kueser, J. B. (2020). After initial retrieval practice, more retrieval produces better retention than more study in the word learning of children with developmental language disorder. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 63(8), 2763-2776. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-20-00105 

(4) Leonard, L. B., Christ, S. L., Deevy, P., Karpicke, J. D., Weber, C., Haebig, E., & Kueser, J. B., Souto, S., & Krok, W. (2021). A multi-study examination of the role of repeated spaced retrieval in the word learning of children with developmental language disorder. Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 13, 20: 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s11689-021-09368-z