The Production Effect in Second Language Verb–Noun Idiom Learning: Evidence From Pure-List Designs and Transfer-Appropriate Processing

Abstract

Learners of a second language often vocalize newly learned items, and previous studies have shown that this practice facilitates the learning of single words and multiword expressions. However, these effects have been demonstrated only in mixed-list designs, where a single list of items is learned using multiple learning methods, and have not been tested in pure-list designs, where each list is learned with one consistent method. Moreover, prior research has relied almost exclusively on written recognition tests, leaving spoken-modality tests and recall measures largely unexamined. This study employed a within-participant, pure-list design in which each list was associated with a single learning condition, and each participant studied a total of four lists. The participants were 68 Japanese learners of English. Participants learned 64 verb–noun idioms assigned across four active learning conditions (Listening, Repeating, Reading while Listening, and Reading while Repeating), with 16 items in a fifth condition serving as a no-exposure Control condition. Learning outcomes were assessed with three test types (form recall, form recognition, and meaning recognition) administered in two modalities (written vs. spoken). In the written test modality, form-recognition performance was higher for the Repeating and Reading-while-Repeating conditions, whereas in the spoken test modality, the strongest form-recall gains were produced for the Reading-while-Repeating condition. These results highlight modality-specific benefits of vocalization and are discussed in relation to the strong-trace account and the transfer-appropriate processing framework.