“…In other words, adults vary in their ability to both learn and retain novel words, yet the origin of this inter-individual word learning variability remains elusive to date. Word learning ability is generally held as the capability to establish connections between novel words and their semantic referents ( Kaushanskaya et al, 2013 ; Borgström et al, 2015 , 2016 ; Hamza et al, 2020 ). In recent studies, different variants of (auditory or visual) paired-associate learning tasks, for example word-meaning association task ( Krug et al, 2002 ; McDermott and Zerr, 2019 ) and word-picture/object association task ( Peñaloza et al, 2016 ; Lany, 2018 ), have been adopted to measure word learning ability.…”