Help me if I can't: Social interaction effects in adult contextual word learning

Contextual cueing in co-active visual search: Joint action allows acquisition of task-irrelevant context

Repeatedly presenting a target within a stable search array facilitates visual search, an effect termed contextual cueing. Previous solo-performance studies have shown that successful acquisition of contextual memories requires explicit allocation of attentional resources to the task-relevant repeated contexts. By contrast, repeated but task-irrelevant contexts could not be learned when presented together with repeated task-relevant contexts due to a blocking effect. Here we investigated if such blocking of context learning could be diminished in a social context, when the task-irrelevant context is task-relevant for a co-actor in a joint action search mode. We adopted the contextual cueing paradigm and extended this to the co-active search mode. Participants learned a context-cued subset of the search displays (color-defined) in the training phase, and their search performance was tested in the transfer phase, where previously irrelevant and relevant subsets were swapped. The experiments were conducted either in a solo search mode (Experiments 1 and 3) or in a co-active search mode (Experiment 2). Consistent with the classical contextual cueing studies, contextual cueing was observed in the training phase of all three experiments. Importantly, however, in the "swapped" test session, a significant contextual cueing effect was manifested only in the co-active search mode, not in the solo search mode. Our findings suggest that social context may widen the scope of attention, thus facilitating the acquisition of task-irrelevant contexts.

The social brain of language: grounding second language learning in social interaction

For centuries, adults may have relied on pedagogies that promote rote memory for the learning of foreign languages through word associations and grammar rules. This contrasts sharply with child language learning which unfolds in socially interactive contexts. In this paper, we advocate an approach to study the social brain of language by grounding second language learning in social interaction. Evidence has accumulated from research in child language, education, and cognitive science pointing to the efficacy and significance of social learning. Work from several recent L2 studies also suggests positive brain changes along with enhanced behavioral outcomes as a result of social learning. Here we provide a blueprint for the brain network underlying social L2 learning, enabling the integration of neurocognitive bases with social cognition of second language while combining theories of language and memory with practical implications for the learning and teaching of a new language in adulthood.

Comparative Effectiveness Between Game-Enhanced and Pencil-and-Paper English Vocabulary Learning Approaches

Numerous studies were devoted to use of games in vocabulary learning in English as a foreign language (EFL) tertiary courses, which reported significant improvements of vocabulary learning when using computer games. This study used a mixed-design research method comparing the effectiveness in EFL vocabulary acquisition. Data was collected from randomly selected participants who were randomly assigned to the interactivity-prone computer game (Group 1), the less interactive-prone computer game (Group 2) and the pencil-and-paper (Group 3) assisted EFL vocabulary learning approaches. The first group learned EFL vocabulary through interactivity-prone computer game Hujiang Fun Vocabulary, the second group learned EFL vocabulary assisted with less interactive computer game Baicizhan, and the third group learned EFL vocabulary via the traditional pencil-and-paper approach. It was concluded that (1) The interactivity-prone computer game was more effective than the less interactivity-prone computer game in EFL vocabulary learning; (2) The computer game-assisted EFL vocabulary learning was significantly more effective than the traditional pencil-and-paper approach; (3) Males outperformed females in computer game-assisted EFL vocabulary learning. It was suggested that future research focuses on both design features of educational computer games and cross-disciplinary research into computer game assisted EFL vocabulary acquisition.