You won’t guess that: On the limited benefits of guessing when learning a foreign language

Abstract

Guessing the meaning of a foreign word before being presented with the right answer benefits recognition performance for the translation compared to reading the full translation outright. However, guessing does not increase memory for the foreign-word-to-translation associations, which is crucial for language acquisition. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether this disadvantage of guessing for performance in cued-recall tests would be eliminated if a restudy phase was added. In Experiments 1–3, we consistently demonstrated that guessing resulted in lower cued-recall performance compared to reading, both before and after restudy. Even for items for which participants successfully recalled their initial guesses on the cued-recall test, accuracy levels did not exceed those from the reading condition. In Experiment 4, we aimed to generalize our findings concerning restudy to a different set of materials – weakly associated word pairs. Even though this time guessing led to better performance than reading, consistent with previous studies, this guessing benefit was not moderated by adding a restudy phase. Our results thus underscore the importance of the initial learning phase for future learning and retention, while undermining the usefulness of the learning-through-guessing strategy for acquiring foreign language vocabulary.

Guessing can benefit memory for related word pairs even when feedback is delayed

“…Most likely this is due to the fact that being presented with negative feedback right after an incorrect guess is a particularly aversive experience, as it underscores straight away the gap between one’s own answer and the correct one. It could be assumed here that when feedback is delayed, participants’ commitment to their earlier guesses is somewhat lessened, and likely not all guesses are even remembered at this stage (see Butowska et al, 2022 , for an interim test of memory for guesses). Thus, our results are consistent with a dual-basis account of JOLs (Koriat et al, 2004 ).…”

Can we learn from errors? Retrieval facilitates the correction of false memories for pragmatic inferences

“…Because of the limitations of guessing errors, it remains unexplored what the benefits of error correction are when using materials that generate responses that involve an episodic retrieval of a previous context or a learning event. This question is key to understand the benefits of error correction given that research has suggested that a guessing error is only beneficial to learning when it can be used as a semantic mediator [ 26 , 32 , 36 , 37 ] but not when unrelated word pairs are learned [ 30 , 31 , 38 , 39 ]. However, the MUAR framework suggests that when information is retrieved from memory (even if incorrectly), memory becomes more vulnerable and amenable to change, making it more prone to be updated with new information [ 22 ] –as would be the case of corrective feedback–suggesting that retrieval might be a promotor for error correction.…”

“…This explanation would account for the finding that, when the guessing error and the target are semantically related, retrieval is enhanced [26,32,[35][36][37]. Other research however has found no effect or even a detrimental effect of guessing when unrelated word pairs were learned [30,31,[38][39][40]. As Metcalfe and Huesler [28] argue: "the notion that the benefit seen from the generation of errors in typical participants is attributable to semantic memory mediation sits awkwardly with the findings that amnesics who are thought to have intact semantic memory but not episodic memory [41][42][43] do not similarly benefit" [28].…”