Mnemonic Versus Nonmnemonic Vocabulary-learning Strategies for Children

Fourth-grade students learned a list of relatively complex English vocabulary words in two experiments. In Experiment 1, pupils used either a mnemonic (“keyword”) contextual or a verbal contextual procedure. In Experiment 2, three other conditions were compared to the keyword context condition. They included a no-strategy control condition and two other contextual variations: (a) an experiential context condition that had been used previously, and (b) a nonkeyword pictorial context condition. In both experiments, the keyword method proved effective for enhancing children’s acquisition of new vocabulary words. Moreover, in the second experiment, neither of the two nonkeyword contextual variations improved students’ performance.