Effects of pictorial referents on the associative learning of spoken word forms in a Nigerian language: an experimental investigation with L1 Japanese users

Participants can associate a new word with a picture more quickly or correctly than with other information. This study investigated whether pictorial referents facilitate the associative learning of spoken word forms in Igbo and referents for native Japanese speakers in a within-subjects design. In the learning task, 80 native Japanese speakers randomly learned associative pairs of spoken Igbo words with pictorial meanings (IP) and written Japanese word meanings (IJ) in a randomised block design. Subsequently, each participant completed three counter-balanced recognition tasks, which consisted of randomly choosing one of the two presented pictures that corresponded with each spoken Igbo word or one of the two written Japanese word meanings that corresponded with a spoken Igbo word. The results showed that participants recognised IP more quickly and accurately than IJ. Our findings suggest that pictorial referents facilitate the accuracy and response time of spoken L2 word-meaning recognition after associative learning.