Do Pictures Help Learn Chinese Vocabulary in the Visual Modality? A Memory and Metamemory Study with Russian and Colombian Samples

Research revealed that phonological access to words allow dual-coding making it easier to learn phonologically accessible words than inaccessible ones. Although studies in alphabetic languages showed pictures facilitate written vocabulary learning, there is no such research in languages with phonologically obscure scripts, such as Chinese. Also, pictures may distort monitoring processes in metamemory, which may eventually undermine learning outcomes. Will pictures help alphabet users remember Chinese words better than translations? Will pictures distort metamemory in learning Chinese words? One hundred thirteen Russian and Colombian participants studied 40 word-aid pairs in four conditions: Hanzi (Chinese in Chinese characters) & picture; Pinyin (Chinese in Latin alphabet) & picture; Hanzi & translation; Pinyin & translation. Participants first evaluated the future recallability of word-aid pairs on a confidence scale (0% to 100%); after distractor tasks, they completed a recognition test for Chinese words only and then word-aid pairs, in which they also indicated the confidence in their answers. For memory, our results revealed an interaction of script and aid in word recognition: participants remembered better words in Hanzi-picture and Pinyin-translation pairs than Hanzi-translation and Pinyin-picture pairs; in word-aid recognition participants made more accurate selections when in picture-paired words than translation-paired words. For metamemory, our results showed that words written in Pinyin and words paired with translations were judged as easier to remember than words written in Hanzi and words paired with pictures; Colombians judged words written in Hanzi harder to remember than Pinyin, while Russians judged picture-paired words harder to remember than translation-paired words. Based on these results, we see that pictures help learn Chinese words in semantic association, but they may interfere with the type of writing system in word recognition, therefore it is likely this facilitative effect takes place only during memory retrieval, not encoding. Furthermore, contrasting with previous studies, pictures are found to deflate judgement of learning in Chinese vocabulary learning, suggesting that effects of pictures in metamemory may be language dependent; and alphabet users do give favorable judgements of learning to a phonologically accessible script than an obscure one. In addition to aid, our study identified country, more specifically the exposure to different orthographies, as a factor in judgement of learning in foreign vocabulary learning, as one’s sociolinguistic environment of may lead to judgement biases. In summary, these findings suggest that effects of pictures in language learning may not be fully supported by current evidence and highlight the need to undertake further research involving different languages and methods.