Related General-Vocabulary Knowledge Transfers to Learning Technical Terms

Abstract

In a classroom experiment during the first week of an introductory psychology course, randomly assigned students received a pretest and then a brief training on the definitions of general-vocabulary words either related (e.g., “facilitation”) or unrelated (e.g., “rendition”) to 16 technical terms (e.g., “social facilitation”). Two days later, after briefly studying the technical-term definitions, all participants took a test requiring recognition of both definitions and novel examples of the technical terms. The group trained on related general-vocabulary words averaged significantly higher on the technical-terms test than did the group trained on unrelated words. Thus, knowledge of related general vocabulary transferred to the learning of technical terms. The discussion focuses on both research related and educational implications of the results.