By Olivia Falls
If you have ever taken any anatomy, psychology, or physics classes, you know the importance of learning and memorizing vocabulary words. Now I know that there are other classes that you can think of where vocabulary was also important, but in my opinion, these were the biggest ones. In these three classes every vocabulary word was important and came back up later in the class. All classes have vocabulary words that you should learn for a test, but with most you can get away with doing a quick review right before the test without actually knowing the words. But, for those classes in which each vocabulary word is needed and necessary to understand the future material, a new strategy is needed. What’s the new strategy? So glad you asked! Using a technique called paired-associate learning, you will be better able to learn and recall the meanings of your vocabulary words. The technique that I am going to talk about might be one that you already use, but simply did not know what it was called. But, regardless of if you have already been using this technique or are just now learning about it, this blog will be helpful in improving your ability to recall information.
What it is
So, what exactly is paired-associate learning, and will it be a hard technique to implement it into your study sessions? The answer is no, it is actually a very simple technique. This term was first described back in 1894 by a psychologist named Mary Whiton Calkins. She gave her participants around ten word pairs. Some had color names paired with numbers and others were “three-letter nonsense syllables” paired with numbers (1). The goal was for the participants, after being shown or told the letters or numbers, to name the corresponding part. For example, if blue and thirteen were a pair and the participant was shown the number thirteen, then the response should be the word blue. This was the first of hundreds of different experiments that have taken place since 1894 that examined paired-associate learning. The purpose of these experiments was to test a person’s ability to learn and recall information. In the case study conducted by Nick Ellis and Alan Beaton, it was said that while using the paired-associate learning technique, words which elicit a mental image were more memorable than those that did not elicit one (2). You might be wondering how imagery and paired-associate learning work to improve your memory, so I’ll tell you.
How it Works
Paired-associate learning is a learning method that all humans have used and can simply be defined as associating an unknown word with a word that has a similar meaning or exact meaning (3). By itself, this method allows for a person to become conditioned in that when one of the paired words is seen or mentioned, the other paired word comes to mind. A somewhat long-term but shaky relationship is formed when looking at the pairs of words and merely reciting them but imagining a picture of the two words together creates a likely long-term and solid relationship. In other words, when imagery becomes involved, thinking of the paired words as pictures in your head, the conditioning and ability to recall them gets even stronger. Gordon Bower and David Winzenz found that repeating the paired words provided only around a third of correct recall responses. But when the participants used imagery to learn the paired words, a little over four-fifths of the recall answers were correct (4). This study, along with many others, support the notion that when using paired-associate learning, imagery should also be used.
Example
“Paired-associate learning is required whenever you link up two items in memory (5).” This method can be used in pretty much any situation that you can think of, and when you add imagery to it things will only improve. For this section though, I’m just going to focus on applying it to school. Imagine that you are in an anatomy class and you need to learn all of the anatomy jargon . Of the words that you need to learn, ventral and dorsal are two of them. Being that you need to link the words with their respective definitions, paired-associate learning will be involved. Ventral can be understood as the front or belly side of a structure so, using imagery, you might make the association by imagining your belly with a vent on top of it. This is likely to help you remember what ventral means because an image will then appear in your head when you think about the word. An added bonus with forming this picture is that you are also likely to experience the self-reference effect. Self-reference effect occurs when you relate something that you are trying to remember to yourself and doing this increases the likelihood of you being able to recall it (6). When thinking about the word dorsal, you can use the same concept by picturing a door laying on top of your back.
For me, every once in a while, I would try to use imagery when learning vocabulary words, but I mostly just used repetition. After learning that I have a better chance of remembering the words for the test when I imagine them with their meaning, I started using this technique more often and my grades have benefitted from it. I’m sure that if you start using this technique, your grades will thank you as well.
(1) Calkins, M. W. (1930). Mary Whiton Calkins. In C. Murchison (Ed.), A history of psychology in autobiography Vol. 1 (p. 31–62). Clark University Press; Russell & Russell/Atheneum Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1037/11401-002
(2) Ellis, N. C., & Beaton, A. (1993, December 1). Psycholinguistic Determinants of Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning. Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1993.tb00627.x
(3) Eunjin, C., Sungmook, C., & Junsoo, K. (2012, July 19). The effect of extensive reading and paired-associate learning on long-term vocabulary retention: An event-related potential study. ScienceDirect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304394012007525
(4) Bower, G., Winzenz, D. (2013, February). Comparison of associative learning strategies. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232548904_Comparison_of_associative_learning_strategies
(5) Paired Associates Brain Test | Cambridge Brain Sciences. (2020). Cambridge Brain Sciences. https://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/science/tasks/paired-associates
(6) Klein, S., & Kihlstrom, J. (1985, July 12). Elaboration, Organization, and the Self-Reference Effect in Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5be4/dff8d03e9b837a50e4b4993ae9122b0123e2.pdf