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THE EFFECT OF PICTURES ON THE ACQUISITION OF A SMALL VOCABULARY OF SIMILAR SIGHT‐WORDS
Author(s) -
SAUNDERS ROBYN J.,
SOLMAN ROBERT T.
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
british journal of educational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.557
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 2044-8279
pISSN - 0007-0998
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8279.1984.tb02590.x
Subject(s) - psychology , vocabulary , noun , word (group theory) , word learning , presentation (obstetrics) , sight , set (abstract data type) , linguistics , computer science , medicine , philosophy , physics , astronomy , radiology , programming language
S ummary . Two experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of pictures on learning to read a set of isolated, similar, common nouns. Five groups of kindergarten children took part in the first study. The children in four of the groups learnt each word using a picture of the thing represented by the word, and in two of these four pictorial groups the children had their attention drawn to the fact that the word and the picture represented the same thing. No mention was made of this relationship to the children in the other two groups, and within each of these association conditions one group of children was presented with the word 1 second prior to the presentation of the picture, and the other group received these inputs simultaneously. The fifth group of children acted as a control by learning the words in the absence of pictures. The results indicated that both the instructions to associate the word and the picture and the viewing of the word prior to the presentation of the picture failed to improve performance. Of more importance, however, was the observation that those children who learnt the words in the absence of pictorial information recognised more words on the critical post‐learning trial than the children in the pictorial groups. Four groups of kindergarten children took part in the second study. The children in two of the groups learnt the words with the aid of pictures, with one group seeing the picture 1 second prior to the word (the primed group) and the other group seeing the picture 1 second after the word (the non‐primed group). The children in the remaining two groups were used as controls, with one group viewing a blank card 1 second prior to the word and the other group viewing the same card 1 second after the word. The results showed no difference in performance between the primed and non‐primed conditions, but, consistent with the first study, the children who did not view pictures out‐performed those who did. It was recommended that when teaching children to recognise visually presented words teachers abandon the general practice of using pictures as aids.