The production effect in memory: a prominent mnemonic in children

Abstract

The 'Production Effect' (PE) refers to a memory advantage for items studied aloud over items studied silently. Thus, vocalizing may serve as a mnemonic that can be used to assist learners in improving their memory for new concepts. Although many other types of mnemonic have been suggested in the literature, the PE seems especially appropriate for young children, as it does not involve literacy skills. The present study is a first investigation of the PE in children. In two experiments we tested five-year-olds in a PE paradigm using pictures of objects as stimuli. In Experiment 1, pictures of familiar objects were presented to be remembered, and in Experiment 2 we used pictures of unfamiliar objects (evaluating new vocabulary acquisition). In both experiments we showed a memory advantage for vocally produced words ('look and say') over other types of learning ('look', 'look and listen'), suggesting the PE as a prominent memory and learning tool.

Reverse production effect: children recognize novel words better when they are heard rather than produced

“…In both Experiments 1 and 2, children successfully mapped novel words to their nonce referents. However, contrary to the majority of results reported from production studies with adults and the only existing research on the production effect with children (Icht & Mama, ), in both of the current studies, children showed better recognition for novel words that were heard rather than produced during the time of training. We call this the reverse production effect , as a counterpart to the previously coined term the production effect (MacLeod et al., ).…”

“…The complexity of our task might partly stem from the use of novel words and nonce referents, both of which have been shown to increase the processing load in word recognition tasks in studies with 14-month-old infants (Fennell, 2012;Fennell & Werker, 2003). While Icht and Mama (2015) found a benefit in recognition for produced items over heard items with low frequency nouns, they defined low frequency as words not likely to be found in children's expressive vocabulary (e.g., anchor, manger, cuff, pestle, razor). As such, children likely had some receptive knowledge of the infrequent word forms and their visual referents.…”

“…This design also provided a control for frequency during training because production increases an item's frequency (Abbs et al., ; Hopkins & Edwards, ): produced items were presented twice during training (once from the computer and once by the participants), and heard items were also presented twice (two times by the computer). A similar control for the frequency of presentation was also done in two studies with adults (Zamuner et al., submitted; Zamuner et al., ), and in a study with 5‐year‐olds by Icht and Mama () which used a live experimenter, and on heard trials the items were produced twice by the experimenter.…”

Learning words and learning sounds: Advances in language development

“…Both in infancy and beyond, studies have shown that word production and use provide a more stable, more reliable, better‐established representation than word recognition or comprehension alone (Icht & Mama, ; MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, & Ozubko, ; Vihman, DePaolis, & Keren‐Portnoy, ; Zamuner, Morin‐Lessard, Strahm, & Page, ). There are many reasons why this should be true, including the greater effort involved in production, which accordingly supports more robust memory or representation (Elbers & Wijnen, ) and the support that a match to a well‐practised production routine affords to the challenge of retaining novel word forms; the matching process, which becomes increasingly accessible as the lexicon grows, constructs or shapes phonological memory (Keren‐Portnoy, Vihman, DePaolis, Whitaker, & Williams, ).…”

The many facets of speech production and its complex effects on phonological processing

“…Even if we limited our discussion to only highly developed, referential speech gestures in older children, the overall picture is still far from simple. Producing speech has been shown to be beneficial for later recall and recognition in both adults (Zamuner, Morin-Lessard, Strahm, & Page, 2016) and children (Icht & Mama, 2015), but this production effect can be attenuated, or even reversed, due to task-, attentional-, linguistic-, and experience-related factors. In the adult literature, for example, speech learning is disrupted when engaging the speech production system in an unrelated task (Baese-Berk & Samuel, 2016).…”