Say it Slowly: Does Slowing the Pacing of Educational Media Promote Vocabulary Learning?

• In Event: 2-148 - Child Talk and Vocabulary Development: Enhancing the Educational Environment of Books and Videos

Integrative Statement

Early vocabulary development is critical for later academic success (Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). However, children tend to learn vocabulary more easily and process language faster when they have stronger extant vocabularies (Marulis & Neuman, 2010; Hurtado, Marchman, & Fernald, 2008). Learning for children with weaker vocabularies may be supported by slowing the pacing of instruction, allowing more time to process information. Slower paced videos are better comprehended than faster paced ones (Wright et al., 1984), but little work has experimentally investigated how pacing differentially impacts the learning of children with different baseline language skills.

The present study investigates whether slowing the pacing of an educational media program promotes vocabulary learning, and whether visual attention predicts learning. We hypothesized that children would learn more vocabulary from the slower-paced media than the original clips, and that learning might be particularly enhanced for children with lower baseline vocabularies and/or English Language Learners (ELLs).

Participants were 70 four-year-olds (51% female; predominantly African American and Hispanic) from low-income households. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) standard scores averaged 78.51 (SD = 14.07). In our within-subjects block design, six vocabulary clips were split into two matched (repetition and word frequency) word blocks. Children viewed one block in the original pace condition, and the other block in the slower pace condition (original clip expanded to 150% of original length). Video block in each condition and condition order were counterbalanced. Children viewed videos on a Tobii T120 Eyetracker.

Participants were initially pretested, and were post-tested after video viewing for i) receptive vocabulary (e.g. “Point to the actor”), ii) auditory definitional understanding (e.g. What would an actor do? Be a princess in a movie? Or fly airplanes in the sky?), and iii) word meaning understanding (e.g. “Point to the one who pretends to be other people).

Repeated Measures ANCOVAs revealed i) that children learned more from the slower paced than original videos for receptive vocabulary, F(1, 63) = 11.53, p < .001, and auditory definitional understanding, F(1, 63) = 5.53, p = .022, ii) a significant three-way interaction for receptive vocabulary between pacing condition, ELL status, and PPVT median split, showing that slower pacing particularly benefited children who were in the middle language groups – i.e. lower in PPVT OR an ELL, but not both, F(1, 63) = 6.27, p = .015, (see Table 1), and iii) percent fixation duration was similar regardless of pacing F(1, 63) = .04, p = .847. Linear regressions revealed that all post-tests were significantly predicted by fixation duration for the standard paced videos, but not the slower paced videos (see Table 2).

Overall, results suggest that slower paced media are beneficial to vocabulary learning, sometimes specifically for children with moderate language backgrounds. Prior work suggests that when information processing is easier, attention does not necessarily predict performance (Kirkorian, Pempek, & Choi, 2017). In our study, attention failed to predict learning in the slower paced videos, but significantly predicted learning for the faster paced ones – suggesting the slower videos may have been easier to process.

Authors

• Preeti Ganesh Samudra, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Kevin M Wong, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan Neuman, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author