“…This limitation can be explained by Samuels' (1967) early work on the focal attention theory suggesting that, for non-readers of normal ability, when a new word to be learned is accompanied by other stimuli, such as a related picture, less efficient learning took place. The reason behind this effect is that part of the attention is directed away from the new word and towards the accompanying pictorial cue (Singer, Samuels, & Spiroff, 1973). Other studies (e.g., Fossett & Mirenda, 2006;Saunders & Solman, 1984;Singh & Solman, 1990) have confirmed Samuels' theory and found that when pictures accompanied the words, students took longer time to reach criterion and made more errors than when pictures were not used.…”