2001 Volume 44 Issue 4 Pages 259-268
The present study was designed to investigate the role of imagery on paired-associate learning (PAL) of Japanese Kanji (Chinese ideograph) and English word meaning. Twenty-three foreign students from non-Kanji using countries participated in the study. To explore the effects of associative imagery and word imagery, three conditions were compared, namely, associative picture (AP) presentation, standard picture (SP) presentation and imagery instruction (II). Recall performances were analyzed from the viewpoint of Shape-imagery (the ease of associating a Kanji shape with the imagery of its referent: SI). Memory performances for high-SI Kanji were the same under all conditions. However, in low-SI Kanji, AP proved to yield better memory performances than the other two conditions. These results showed that associative imagery, not imagery of the stimulus itself, plays an important role in PAL. This finding seems to support Bower’s interpretation (1970) about the role of imagery in the PAL of word pairs.
