Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Human Learning and Cognition

Fall 2003

Answers - Week 8 Terry, Chapter 6

1. What is verbal learning and what was Ebbinhaus trying to prove with his experiments?

Verbal learning has to do with memorizing or learning lists of words. Basically this is done as a method of studying how the memory really works. We need to be careful how we assess this because of verbal learning task is often very different then how people actually learn language in the real world. Unfortunately verbal learning is very similar, in many ways, to how people learn language in the classroom. Think about how many times you giving your students lists of vocabulary items which they didn't really know very much about or didn't care about. Ebbinghaus was obviously aware that his verbal learning was not really about language learning (this is evidenced in his use of meaningless syllables as well as his use of more meaningful syllables). That was not his chief concern, or really his concern at all. What he was really concerned about the simply tried to identify some elements of memory as it relates to learning. Chief among his concerns was how information is housed in the brain so that it can be recalled with efficiency.

2. What is serial learning and what are some of its variables?

Serial learning is basically learning a list of items according to their sequence. Again, this is basically what Ebbinhaus was doing with his experiments. He was primarily concerned with the idea of listing. This might seem like something that's not actually very important in relation to the real world. After all, how often we really exposed to lists? Upon further consideration, however, we find that serial learning is very much a part of our daily lives. Almost everything we do occurs in a particular sequence. This extends from how we move through physical space to how we think about things and solving problems. In the Ratey (2001) we already read about movement systems and how movement relates to cognition, or really that cognition is a metaphorical extension of movement. Well, movement is really only possible when built on a basis of serial learning. Not only need to sequence movements and actions, but we also need to understand the consequences of each particular movement in relation to each other and to a whole. This is pretty complex stuff and it makes serial learning, which might seem extremely boring at first, actually very interesting and relevant.

There are several things and serial learning which we need to focus of attention on, and which do actually relate to a large way to language learning, for language itself is prey to sequencing. The whole idea syntax relates to nothing but how objects are sequenced. One thing we see is that the position of an item within the list has a very profound effect on how well it is going to be learned and recalled. Not surprisingly, it is items at the beginning in the end of a list which are more easily recalled. I indicated that this was not surprising because we find the same kind of effects in series of lexical storage, wherein lexical items are accessed primarily based on beginning sequences and final sequences in the middle sequences are actually hard to access, and actually are often not required. Researchers have drawn up an inverted U-shaped curve to show these kind of effects. Aitchison (1987), in writing about accessing units in the mental lexicon, refers to this as the bathtub effect. If we think about sentence structure now we will see how this relates to the actual meeting in sentences. It may not at all be a coincidence that subjects, or agents have a strong tendency to come first in most languages. Objects, which are arguably less important, appear in the middle of the sentence in most languages. Also, following data presented in Nichols (1992) verb last languages are the most common type of language in the world, thus supporting this idea as having some sort of effective in language.

Another interesting effect observed in serial learning is the idea of anchors. Anything that is distinctive or doesn't seem in with the rest can often be seen as an anchor. An anchor can also be an overall type of context, such as a fixed space in time. Items in the list are associated with this type of anchor. Because, as has been observed above, middle items in a list do not seem to be linked to the context itself but to each other, it is actually quite efficient to try to create an anchor right in the middle of the list which will allow these middle items to associate with some sort of contextual clue. Anchors, while often facilitative in the learning process, can also show inhibited or interference factors. If the anchor is too strong it might actually inhibit some of the items in the list from being remembered. For basic anchors researchers described two types of interference proactive and retroactive. Both of these types of interference prey on middle items in the list, thus explaining why people possibly have more difficulty remembering middle items.

The last and go to talk about relation to serial learning is the idea of associations. They're basically two different opinions here. The initial assumption is that associations go from an item to item basis. Following this they use of one item would trigger the memory of another item, which would trigger the next item, and the next, and the next to the entire list was complete. Critics of this have argued that it simply is not fast enough and that it also ignores some observations have been made in the real world. The alternative theory is the remote association theory and also the group association theory. In these two, somewhat related theories, the idea associations is taken to be a little more complex. In the former associations can occur across distances. What this theory really involves in the idea of different weights of associations, with more closely related words physically having stronger associations, but other items being associated in a weaker way but still associated. The latter theory expands on the idea that items are associated as groups or, to use terminology from the field of lexical study, chunks. In reality things are probably associated using all these different kinds.

Following all these kinds of observations we can see that serial learning experiments can tell us not only about how the memory works, but more importantly the results seem to tie in with what we know about language structure as well.

3. What is paired-associate learning and how can it be analyzed?

The basic idea behind paired-associate learning is basely that which we saw in classical conditioning. Simply put, two items which happen to co--occur are associated. This is a simple idea behind paired associate learning. This type of learning is usually done in relation to lists of pairs. It isn't as to control situation we can actually find out some specific variables in the process of paired associate learning. It is easy to see how this, again as we discussed earlier, is really part of our everyday life and quite specifically the very basis of language learning, both L1 and L2 (+) learning. The first idea these be tackled or controlled in paired associate learning is being able to distinguish the two items that are being associated from other items in the world. This might seem like a simple thing, but even when we just think about language we find that is very easy to get items confused if they are not properly differentiated. Such confusion is a common phenomenon and listening comprehension in large part because the second language learners are not able to distinguish sounds in the target language and therefore are not able to distinguish lexical items. Thus, as teachers the first thing we need to do is to be able to make sure that students can actually distinguish the units that we're trying to get them to associate. We do this by accentuating certain distinctive features of the items. In the case of lexical items we would overemphasize certain phonemic code items. Following this, it would seem that features are very important in this process. What we've learned to distinguish different items only then can we begin to actually learn them through association.

Different factors seem to affect how efficient stimulus response learning is going to be. Obviously, responses which can be linked immediately to many other things which have or even learned will be easier to learn. This is a simple idea of meaningful learning which puncture all of you have heard about. Connections seem to matter. In a way, if your brain is ready to take in a particular item that will do so much more easily. Teachers then need to make sure that students can see how new items fitted with the overall cognitive structure and framework. This of course relates in a very direct way to what we talked about in clutter theory. There has to be space were something can fit otherwise it won't, at least not very easily. Basically what were talking about here is what was already mentioned under the name of feature hopping. The more features we can hop from one new item to another or to pre-existing items in the brain the easier it will be to learn that new item. The same idea we find in cognitive elaboration. The elaborate so that we can create, and draw the students attention to association security exist or features which can hop from one item to another.

What is also interesting here is order. The order which we set up the association seems to be important. This is something which is going to play out actually very differently and first language acquisition and second-language acquisition depending of course on how the second range acquisition is done, or how the input is handled. Terry (2001) points out that we seem to have one way types of associations. This is definitely true when the talking about first language. This is basically what we call collocation. So, for example, baby will associated with boy, but boy will not associate for baby. This reflects what's actually encoded in the brain. It needs to be this way and it's perfectly fine we're dealing with first language. Ultimately disabled also have to hold true for the second or subsequent languages that are learned because all languages are based on collocation links and stored chunks in the mind. If, however, you as a teacher practicing translation from one code (language) to another then it seems to be important to reverse the order in order to enhance learning. So the start off by translating from Korean into English to try to form association between two items that would seem to also help to try to have the students the opposite and try to get the also sometimes move from English into Korean is a way of practice in order to solidify this type of association. The only danger here, as mentioned above, is that such two-way links don't regularly exist in most language, or single language codes.

4. What are some of the variables that affect free recall?

There are basically three variables that seem to affect free recall types of experiments. At this point none of them should come as a huge surprise for you are we have already mentioned them in the other types of verbal learning experiments. They are:

Serial position

The issues underlying serial position should be fairly simple. Again we know that words of the beginning of lists and at the end of lists seem to be easier to remember. There to possible explanations for this one has to do with priming (beginning) and the other has to do with recency (end). The other explanation is one related to differences in short-term memory and long-term memory.

Rehearsal

The idea behind rehearsal is simple. The more rehearsal the better and this seems to education level. Those who have been successful students have some how learned how to rehearse and to rehearse effectively. This is shown in the fact that distributed rehearsal works better and that more experienced students seem to know this. Rehearsal can also be correlated with memory and this correlation can be used to explain why first words are m mostly effected by rehearsal

Organization

Organization seems to also have a strong effect on recall. Interestingly, there seems to be threshold effects on organization in the that the more words someone already has the easier it will be to organize and the there fore the easier it will be to learn new items using strategies like organization. Thus, for us as teachers we need to try to organize the new linguistic information we are presenting our students with. Maybe the simplest way of doing this is not be presenting them with meaningless unorganized lists but by giving them authentic texts which should have their own type of inner organization and meaningfulness.

5. How do available and accessible memories differ and why do they do so?

Available memories simply include those things which have made it to the long-term memory store. This group includes all the things that you have ever learned, in theory anyway. Studies have shown that even though material may be available it may not be recalled or recognized. A relearning test may be required to see what is actually stored. Accessible memories are those things which we have learned (Are stored in the long-term memory) and which may be called upon for use when necessary. Accessible memories are one we generally have no trouble calling up and using. The main difference between these two, as defined by what we think we know about how the brain works would be related to their activation levels. All memories, or really parts of memories in the brain (OK, Let`s call it bits of information.): All bit os information in the brain is activated through a change in the chemical composition of the neurons holding the information. This is achieved through an electro-chemical process called firing. Neurons vary greatly in their degree of stability. Generally, the more stable or inert the set of neurons are, the harder it is to activate them: more energy is required for firing. Accessible memories in the brain represent information with lower activation levels. Activation levels are set based on use, either direct or indirect. It is important to remember that memories, according to certain theories are not housed as solid blocks in the brain and they are housed on a large number of connected neurons, which are in turn connected to other neurons. If a memory(i) or parts of a memory(i) are connected to other memories(j-x) that are highly salient and therefore much used then all memories linked to (j-x) will be fired residually and will have lower activation levels as a result. Following this, we can see just how important connections really are.

6. How and why do mnemonics work?

What all the hoopla about mnemonics comes down to is connections. It may actually be a special type of learning which simply takes advantage of the way the brain is structured and functions. I call it learning because mnemonics is just about forming associations: that is learning associations between two unrelated concepts or a series of concepts. The big trick is the concept upon which the new information is anchored. For mnemonics to work the new information must be associated with old and highly used or meaningful information. This means that the activation levels for the new and invariably less useful information will immediately start out as being low and will probably stay that way. Mnemonics make new and basically meaningless information immediately accessible by forming a series of connections with readily accessible information. The only big problem with mnemonics is that they are hard to come up with. This makes them somewhat less practical in the real world. It is not only difficult to find mnemonics that work well but can also be harmful. Especially when we are dealing with language, which is so intertwined with culture and specific experiences and people, trying to use mnemonic devices such as keywords can end up having detrimental long-term effects. Linking the TL to the L1 is never really good long-term strategy because it actually will weaken the possibilities for forming good connections within the L2 system.