Vocabulary acquisition and the generation effect

This study investigated two methods of inducing the Generation Effect and how its principles might be incorporated in vocabulary acquisition. Subjects attempted to learn 22 unfamiliar vocabulary words under one of three conditions. (1) definition-only control subjects repeatedly wrote each word and definition; (2) sentence generation subjects wrote each word and definition and then wrote a meaningful sentence using that word; and (3) definition generation subjects read the words embedded in context sentences and extrapolated and wrote the word meanings. Subjects were tested following a distracter task, 48-hours later, and again 21-days later. Significant main effects were found for encoding condition and time of test, with no significant interaction between the two. Sentence generation subjects performed better than the other two groups of subjects and subjects performed best at immediate recall, followed by 48-hour and then 21-day delayed recall. The results are interpreted with respect to a levels-of-processing explanation.