Mnemonic versus nonmnemonic vocabulary learning strategies: Additional Comparisons

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 nonkey-word contextual variations improved students ' performance. The present study had two major purposes. The first was to investigate the potential of a mnemonic (memory-enhancing) strategy for improvin