The Effects of Animation and Cueing in the Acquisition of Spanish Vocabulary

Abstract

According to Paivio’s (1971, 2007) Dual Coding Theory (DCT), cognitive information is stored in two separate systems, the visual and the verbal system. Both are linked through cognitive connections that lead to better memorization and remembering of both words and images. The current thesis intends to study the use of dynamic and static images in Spanish L2 vocabulary acquisition and the effects of cueing when presented with those two types of visual representations. An experiment was conducted in twenty-two sections of beginner Spanish at Auburn University in four days. Two conditions were applied, i.e. dynamic versus static images and cueing versus absence of cueing. The twenty-two sections were divided in four treatment groups: static and absence of cueing (Control group), static and cueing (Group A), dynamic and absence of cueing (Group B), and dynamic and cueing (Group C). In order to gather data, participants were provided a recall and a recognition test both in a short term (after instruction) and a long term period (thirty-six days after instruction). Also, recall was divided in two different analyses: effectiveness (i.e. when the words were correct or orthographically related to the original) and production (i.e. only exact words were considered right). Results showed that there are no significant differences in the use of dynamic and static images in four of the six tests. However, dynamic images proved to be more effective in the short term recall test when measuring production. On the contrary, static images proved to be significantly better than static images in the long term recall test when measuring production. Discussion on the findings is presented.