A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Queen Margaret University

language and yet others used nonsense or non-words to observe vocabulary
learning.
A small number of studies have employed the use of vocabulary in the native
language of participants that was considered to be unfamiliar to them, as a
method for observing learning. Freed, Marshall, and Phillips’ (1998) investigation
involved 30 adults learning to match 20 colour photographs of unfamiliar breeds
of dogs with their names and evaluated the success of semantic and
phonological cueing in an over-learning technique. Downes, Kalla, Davies,
Flynn, Ali and Mayes (1997) also employed native language vocabulary in the
form of surnames, which were extracted from the phonebook and paired with
photographs of people who were unfamiliar to participants. They evaluated the
effectiveness of two techniques (separately and combined) in facilitating the
learning of matched pairs - the ‘pre-exposure’ technique and the imagery
technique (see section 2.8.5.2). The pre-exposure technique involved the
presentation of the photograph (face) alone to participants, without giving further
information or requiring a response, prior to presenting the associated name.
This aimed to provide a representation of the stimuli before introducing further
information. The imagery technique involved capitalising on the high imageability
of the names, which were chosen specifically for this purpose. Participants were
offered a mental mage for each face-name pair in an attempt to assign meaning
to the arbitrary labels (in this case surnames), for example, they were told to
imagine Mr. Fox as having a bushy tail in place of his nose (Downes et al.,
1997). The results indicated that the pre-exposure technique alongside the
imagery technique produced significantly greater results than either technique
alone for learning and recall. The authors assert that the pre-exposure technique
is involved in the encoding and storage/consolidation of material and when
combined with the imagery technique produces significant gains in learning
performance.
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