Recall and response time norms for English–Swahili word pairs and facts about Kenya

Abstract

In the vast literature exploring learning, many studies have used paired-associate stimuli, despite the fact that real-world learning involves many different types of information. One of the most popular materials used in studies of learning has been a set of Swahili-English word pairs for which Nelson and Dunlosky (Memory 2; 325-335, 1994) published recall norms two decades ago. These norms involved use of the Swahili words as cues to facilitate recall of the English translation. It is unclear whether cueing in the opposite direction (from English to Swahili) would lead to symmetric recall performance. Bilingual research has suggested that translation in these two different directions involves asymmetric links that may differentially impact recall performance, depending on which language is used as the cue (Kroll & Stewart, Journal of Memory and Language 33; 1994). Moreover, the norms for these and many other learning stimuli have typically been gathered from college students. In the present study, we report recall accuracy and response time norms for Swahili words when they are cued by their English translations. We also report norms for a companion set of fact stimuli that may be used along with the SwahiliEnglish word pairs to assess learning on a broader scale across different stimulus materials. Data were collected using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to establish a sample that was diverse in both age and ethnicity. These different, but related, stimulus sets will be applicable to studies of learning, metacognition, and memory in diverse samples.

Norms for Familiarity, Concreteness, Valence, Arousal, Wordlikeness, and Recall Accuracy for Swahili–Portuguese Word Pairs

“…Finally, mirroring previous normative studies, we correlated recall accuracy for each word pair across trials. As Table 3 shows, recall accuracy on Trials 1, 2, and 3 had strongly significant correlations (rs = .65-.88), thus replicating previous normative studies which demonstrates that the relative difficulty of word pairs was retained across trials (Bangert & Heydarian, 2017;Cho et al, 2020;Grimaldi et al, 2010;Nelson & Dunlosky, 1994).…”

“…A number of limitations of the present study should be noted. First, compared to previous recall accuracy normative studies (Bangert & Heydarian, 2017;Cho et al, 2020;Grimaldi et al, 2010;Nelson & Dunlosky, 1994), our Study 2's sample size was rather unusual. However, the strong positive correlations between word-attribute estimates for Studies 1a and 1b (see Figure 3) seems to point to the idea that even smaller samples are capable of producing reliable and stable estimates of word attributes.…”

“…This is the first study to gather normative measures for recall accuracy for word pairs in which either cue or target, or both are in Brazilian Portuguese. More importantly, as far as we know, among the normative studies for recall accuracy (Bangert & Heydarian, 2017;Cho et al, 2020;Grimaldi et al, 2010;Nelson & Dunlosky, 1994), this is the first one that gathered data with participants from a non-WEIRD society. Recently, some scholars have said that psychologists should emphasize close replications, asking what findings generalize to participants from non-WEIRD societies and what findings differ across cultures (Henrich et al, 2010;LeBel & Peters, 2011;Papagno et al, 1991;Roediger & Yamashiro, 2018).…”

“…In addition to estimating different word attributes, researchers have also sought to estimate recall accuracy for word pairs. The most cited of these works, Nelson and Dunlosky (1994) used a multitrial learning task that was also adopted in subsequent normative studies (Bangert & Heydarian, 2017;Cho et al, 2020;Grimaldi et al, 2010). In this kind of task, participants carry out three study-test cycles of a set of word pairs.…”

“…In previous studies, researchers have addressed how word attributes relate to later recall accuracy (Bangert & Heydarian, 2017;Cho et al, 2020;Grimaldi et al, 2010;Nelson & Dunlosky, 1994). For example, Nelson and Dunlosky and Grimaldi et al found small, but significant correlations between frequency of ocurrence of English words and recall accuracy on Trial 1, rs = .25, ps < .05.…”