Applied Psycholinguistics 19 (1998), 537-552

Printed in the United States of America

Working memory and distributed

vocabulary learning
PAUL W. B. ATKINS
University of New South Wales

ALAN D. BADDELEY
University of Bristol

ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE

Paul Atkins, School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Kensington, Sydney,
NSW 2052, Australia. Email: p.atkins@unsw.edu.au

ABSTRACT
This study tested the hypothesis that individual differences in immediate verbal memory span would
predict success in second language vocabulary acquisition. The subjects learned 56 English-Finnish
translations during two sessions using a method in which they were encouraged to distribute their
learning and to use semantic encoding strategies where appropriate. Verbal, but not visuo-spatial,
memory span was correlated with the rate of vocabulary learning, a result that could not have
occurred because of immediate retrieval from a short-term buffer. When tested one week later, the
subjects were less likely to remember those words they had had difficulty learning, even though
they had studied these items more often. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings
for vocabulary learning are discussed.

In recent years there has been an increase in studies concerned with the psycho-
logical processes underlying second language learning (Ellis, 1994). Some stud-
ies have been essentially practical in nature, as in the case of employing imagery
mnemonics in language learning (Gruneberg, 1992). Others have been more
analytic in aim, as with Ellis and Beaton's (1993) studies of the relative contri-
butions of imagery and rehearsal in vocabulary acquisition. Yet others have
been concerned with the analysis of the base cognitive systems that might be
assumed to underlie language acquisition.
An example of the third approach is the work stemming from the Baddeley
and Hitch (1974) model of working memory. The model has a subcomponent -
the phonological loop-that is assumed to be responsible for the temporary
maintenance of acoustic or speech-based information and is most characteristi-
cally measured by the digit span test, which involves the immediate serial recall
of strings of numbers. It has been suggested that this subsystem evolved as an
important mechanism involved in the acquisition of language. Evidence for this
claim comes from studies of vocabulary development in children (Gathercole &
Baddeley, 1989), studies of vocabulary acquisition in both normal and language
impaired children (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990a), problems in second lan-
© 1998 Cambridge University Press 0142-7164/98 $9.50
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Atkins & Baddeley: Working memory and vocabulary learning

guage learning in patients with a specific deficit in this system (Baddeley, 1993;
Baddeley, Papagno, & Vallar, 1988), and studies of the role of the phonological
loop in second language vocabulary acquisition in children (Service, 1992; Ser-
vice & Kohonen, 1995) and adults (Papagno, Valentine, & Baddeley, 1991;
Papagno & Vallar, 1992, 1995).
Many of the previous studies of adults simulate foreign language vocabulary
acquisition by means of a laboratory-based technique that offers careful experi-
mental control but deviates from the methods that would typically be used in
second language teaching. Generally, eight word-nonword or native language-
foreign language pairs are presented, at a fixed rate, for study. Then, either
immediately after the study period or after a short delay, the eight stimulus
words are presented, at a fixed rate, for testing. In some respects, this learning
procedure is similar to that used to test short-term memory span. Therefore, it
is not surprising that short-term span is correlated with the vocabulary acquisi-
tion when it is measured in this rather artificial way.
In naturalistic vocabulary learning, such a controlled approach to learning
vocabulary items is probably not the most efficient method. Studies of distrib-
uted versus massed practice regimes demonstrate clearly that, for long-term
learning, it is more effective to vary the presentation interval between items
such that each item is tested when it is at the threshold of recall (Cull, Shaugh-
nessy, & Zechmeister, 1996; Landauer & Bjork, 1978): that is, when the item
is neither so easy to recall that no effort is required for retrieval nor so difficult
to recall that the retrieval attempt fails.
For the present study, we employed a distributed practice regime during learn-
ing. With this procedure, the emphasis shifts from monitoring the level of per-
formance on the entire list to optimizing the long-term retention of individual
items. The subjects were able to concentrate on learning those items that were
difficult for them and pay relatively less attention to those items that they found
easy to learn. The subjects were also provided with immediate feedback if they
incorrectly translated an item. Under these learning conditions, it is possible
that the correlation between short-term span and vocabulary learning may be
diminished or even eliminated. Although this approach to learning is not identi-
cal to the naturalistic learning of foreign languages, it is more naturalistic than
previous laboratory studies while still allowing a high degree of experimental
control. This control allowed us to examine the nature and frequency of errors
during learning.
Another difference between the present study and previous research is that
we assessed memory span using both auditorily and visually presented span
tests. Previous studies have relied on the auditory presentation of the span tests.
In this case, the items in the vocabulary learning task were presented visually;
one might expect that any observed relationship between working memory span
and vocabulary learning would be stronger for visual than auditory span tests.
The learning data reported in the current study came from the original learn-
ing phases of an experiment that examined vocabulary releaming. Atkins (1995)
studied whether relearning a portion of a previously learned foreign language
vocabulary helped or hindered memory for the remainder of the vocabulary that
was not releamed. That study included both the learning of individual words as
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Atkins & Baddeley: Working memory and vocabulary learning

vocabulary items and a sentence learning condition in which pairs of words

were combined in a simple sentential context. The inclusion of the sentence
condition served to explore more widely the question of whether phonological
working memory is implicated in vocabulary acquisition. Papagno et al. (1991)
concluded that the phonological component of working memory might play a
diminished role in vocabulary acquisition if the subject makes use of semantic
associations during learning. In this study, we made no attempt to control the
use of semantically based strategies during learning. Indeed, we expected that
learning words in the context of short sentences might encourage subjects to
form semantic associations. If this is the case, then short-term span might be
less strongly correlated with the rate of vocabulary learning when sentences
rather than individual words are learned.
Aside from testing the effects of phonological span on vocabulary learning,
a second goal of the current investigation was to examine the effects of errors
during vocabulary learning on retention after a week. Wilson, Baddeley, Evans,
and Shiel (1994) showed that memory-impaired people learned more effectively
when they were prevented from making errors during learning. If errorless learn-
ing produces better long-term retention in normal adults learning foreign lan-
guage vocabulary, it may be possible to improve the efficiency of vocabulary
learning by minimizing the number of errors made during learning. Unlike Wil-
son et al., we did not explicitly seek to minimize errors during learning. We
used a learning strategy that concentrated on the learning of individual items
rather than lists, and therefore we were able to examine the relationship between
the number of errors made during original learning for individual vocabulary
items and long-term retention.

METHOD

Subjects
A total of 32 subjects were originally selected from the Applied Psychology
Unit (Cambridge, UK) subject panel. Two subjects were excluded from the
experiment because of illness or computer malfunction, leaving a sample size
of 30. The subjects ranged in age between 19 and 40, with a mean age of 30.
Twelve of the subjects were men, and all of the subjects spoke English fluently.
All subjects were paid £4 per hour for their participation in the experiment. The
subjects were required to answer a questionnaire indicating their experience
learning languages. None of the subjects had previously learned Finnish, the
language used in our study. Most of the subjects had learned one or two lan-
guages at school and then terminated formal study of languages. Of these, some
had subsequently learned another language to tourist level. Four of the subjects
continued actively to learn other languages following school and considered
themselves fluent or semifluent in at least two languages other than English.

Vocabulary learning
A total of 56 English-Finnish translation pairs were grouped into four lists of
14 pairs each. The first list contained nouns from the category, Fruits and Vege-
tables, and the second list contained nouns from the category, Animals. The
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Atkins & Baddeley: Working memory and vocabulary learning

other two lists were adjectives that could appropriately be paired with a noun
in the sentence condition. Each noun was always paired with the same adjective
in the sentence condition.
The sentences consisted of a noun and an adjective in the form "The <noun>
is <adjective>." The Finnish translation of this sentence is "<noun> on <adjec-
tive>." Each subject was informed that is translates as "on," and that the definite
article the is not used in Finnish. During test trials, each subject was presented
with the complete English sentence and required to enter all three words of the
Finnish response. For the sentences, each word was scored individually; thus a
correct translation of only one of the words in the sentence was counted as one
error, while incorrect translations of both words or a failure to provide a.transla-
tion was counted as two errors.
All learning and testing were conducted individually on a computer. The sub-
jects were informed that all study and testing would be subject paced, and that
they would only be required to translate from English to Finnish.
There were two types of trial: study and test. For the study trials, both the
English and the Finnish items were presented, while for the test trials, only the
English items were presented, and the subject typed the translations in Finnish.
The subjects were not forced to enter a translation, but they were encouraged to
guess.
On the first run through each list, the item was presented first for a study trial
and then for a test trial. The study/test procedure continued with the same word
until the correct translation was provided for the first time. This ensured that
the subjects had studied the Finnish response adequately to provide the correct
spelling.
When all the items in the list had been presented, the subject entered the
more general anticipation procedure, which was used until he or she had learned
the list. On each trial, the English word or sentence was presented. If the subject
correctly translated the word, the next item was randomly selected for testing.
If the translation was incorrect or no translation was provided, the correct an-
swer was shown.
Each time a correct translation was provided, the item was dropped from the
list for that period of training. For the sentence condition, a correct translation
of both words was required before the sentence was dropped from the learning
list. When all the items had been correctly translated once, the list was reassem-
bled. The anticipation procedure continued until the subject reached the criterion
of a faultless translation of every item in the list.
The experiment involved two testing sessions. In Session 1, each subject
learned three lists: a practice list containing 3 translation pairs and two lists of
14 translation pairs each. Half the subjects learned two lists of 7 two-word
sentences composed of a noun and an adjective. The other half learned two lists
of 14 word pairs, with one list consisting of nouns and the other consisting of
adjectives. Thus, all subjects learned 28 experimental translation pairs consisting
of 14 nouns and 14 adjectives during the first session.
Each subject returned after one week for the second session. Subjects first
releamed the list that they had learned the previous week using the anticipation
procedure. (For the purposes of this article, the relearning data are not consid-
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Atkins & Baddcley: Working memory and vocabulary learning

ered.) Once the two old lists had been releamed to criterion, the two new lists
were presented for learning. The specific lists that were learned and the nature
of learning (i.e., sentences or words) were counterbalanced between subjects.

Tests of short-term memory

For each subject, memory span was assessed in two subsequent sessions. Seven
tests of short-term memory span were administered. The six verbal span tasks
measured digit span (digits 0 to 9), phonologically similar letter span (letters B,
C, D, G, P, T, or V), and phonologically dissimilar letter span (letters J, H, Q,
L, R, M, or F), with the sequences either spoken by the experimenter or pre-
sented on the screen of a computer.
For all the tests, the subject was required to recite aloud the entire sequence,
in order, following the presentation of the list. Three sequences were presented
at each sequence length, beginning with three items and increasing until the
subject was unable to recite any of the three sequences of a given length cor-
rectly. The span was taken to be the average length of the last three successfully
recalled sequences. All the span tasks used the same test materials as Baddeley
(1993), although some additional items were added to the digit and letter span
tests to avoid ceiling effects. Items were not repeated within a sequence except
in the longer lists, where repetition was necessary.
For the auditorily presented digit and letter span tests, the sequences were
read aloud by the experimenter at a rate of one item per second with an even
tone throughout and a slight drop at the end to signal the end of the sequence.
For the visually presented span tests, each item was presented for 1 second in
the center of a computer screen. At the end of the sequence, the screen went
blank. The subjects were instructed to commence recitation of the sequence
when all the items had been presented. The sequences used for the visually and
auditorily presented span tasks were identical, but each modality was tested in
a separate session one month apart.

Visuo-spatial recall test

Visual short-term memory was assessed using a test of memory for patterns.
The test was a pencil and paper version of a measure previously implemented
as a computer program (Wilson, Wiedmann, Hadley, & Brooks, 1989). The
subjects were presented with matrices on which half the cells were filled in.
Each matrix was presented to the subject for 3 seconds and then removed. The
subject then filled in the corresponding cells of an empty matrix on a response
sheet. The subjects took as long as they wished to complete the matrix, and they
were allowed to alter their responses during recall. They were informed that for
every matrix half the cells would be filled. If they filled in an incorrect number
of cells they were told how many cells should have been filled in and were
given time to modify their response.
The test began with a 2 x 2 matrix (with two cells filled). Three matrices of
each size were presented with increments of two (i.e., one extra filled square)
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Atkins & Baddeley: Working memory and vocabulary learning

until the subject failed to recall all three matrices of a given size. This test was
included to provide a measure of nonverbal span. It is virtually impossible to
encode the matrices verbally.

RESULTS
Vocabulary learning speed was defined as the average number of errors per list
during learning to criterion for the first time the list was learned. For this study,
we did not analyze the data from vocabulary releaming. Performance varied
between subjects, from a minimum of 5.3 errors per list to a maximum of 71.0
(Af = 20.2, SD= 16.6). The subject who made the most errors adopted a com-
pletely different learning strategy from the other subjects. Instead of concentrat-
ing on studying each item as it was presented, he reported that he had moved
rapidly through the items without making any attempt at translation until he was
absolutely sure of the correct response. Using this strategy, he made an average
of 43 omission errors per list, over 5 standard deviations more than the mean
of the rest of the subjects (M = 6.6, SD = 7.0). Although this behavior is an
interesting variant on the way in which the other subjects learned the list, this
subject's error score lay so far outside the range of the other subjects that we
excluded him from the analysis, leaving a sample of 29 subjects with a mean
error score of 18.4 (SD = 13.7).
Occasionally, a subject made an error when tested on an item that had just
been presented for study. Usually this occurred following the first study presen-
tation of each item. However, using the dropout procedure, subjects occasionally
made repeated errors on the last learned item in the list. These errors might
have reflected a loss from short-term memory and therefore might have inflated
the correlation between short-term span and vocabulary learning speed. There-
fore, to avoid the possibility of short-term memory effects confounding the re-
sults, any error made immediately after a study trial of the same item was ex-
cluded from the results. Because this occurred relatively infrequently, this
exclusion did not affect the results.
Retrieval from a short-term buffer might have also played a role in previous
experimental studies of the relationship between phonological span and vocabu-
lary learning. In experiments where vocabulary retention was tested immediately
after studying new words, a recency effect might have increased the magnitude
of the relationship between short-term phonological memory and vocabulary
learning (Peterson, 1966). For example, if the last studied items were retained
in a short-term buffer and those items were tested immediately after study, the
subject could be expected to successfully recall them. Given that a successful
retrieval of an item appears to serve as a learning trial (Allen, Mahler, & Estes,
1969; Bjork, 1975; Gardiner, Craik, & Bleasdale, 1973; Hogan & Kintsch,
1971), these chance matches between late studied and early tested items might
have led to incremental long-term learning across trials that was dependent upon
short-term retention.
However, in the current study the mean time between the study and test of
each item was considerably longer than was the case for the list learning proce-
dure employed in previous experimental studies. The mean time elapsed be-
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Atkins & Baddeley: Working memory and vocabulary learning

Table 1. Summary statistics and correlations for the short-term memory span tasks

Correlations

Test Mean 1

Auditorily presented tests

1. Digit span 7.11(1.12)
2. Phonologically dissimilar
letters 6.14(1.08) .58**
3. Phonologically similar
letters 4.91(1.01) .41* .60**
Visually presented tests
4. Digit span 6.97(1.35) .70** .69** .48**
5. Phonologically dissimilar
letters 6.17(1.09) .53** .67** .31 .81**
6. Phonologically similar
letters 5.17(1.00) .53** .53** .59** .66** .59**
7. Visuo-spatial pattern recall 18.57(3.13) .26 .35 -.01 .37* .31 .39*

Note: N = 29. Figures in parentheses indicate SD.

*p < .05, **p < .01 (two-tailed).

tween tests of the same item was 194 seconds (SD = 140). Across the first third
of the learning trials, when most errors were made, the average elapsed time
between test trials was 231 seconds (SD = 164) or nearly 4 minutes. Therefore,
it seems unlikely that failures of immediate retrieval from a short-term buffer
substantially influenced the number of errors made during learning.
As Table 1 shows, the verbal memory span tests were strongly intercorrelated
with one another but were not correlated with the visuo-spatial recall test. A
principal components analysis of the span measures with varimax rotation re-
vealed two factors with eigenvalues greater than 1. The six verbal span measures
grouped into the first factor, while the visuo-spatial measure formed a second
factor on its own (Table 2). The factor scores were generated for each subject:
the first factor score primarily represented the verbal span tasks, irrespective of
modality of presentation, and the second factor represented performance on the
visual span task.

Vocabulary learning speed

We used two scoring criteria to measure vocabulary learning. The strict scoring
criterion simply counted any omission or response that did not exactly match
the target response as an error. The lenient scoring criterion allowed minor
spelling mistakes in the response, as when one letter was different or two letters
were transposed. If the subjects phonologically recoded the visually presented
foreign language vocabulary, slight spelling errors might have occurred because
of discrepancies between English and Finnish in the way that sounds are trans-
lated into spelling.
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Atkins & Baddcley: Working memory and vocabulary learning
Table 2. Factor matrix indicating the six verbal span
measures weight on factor 1 while the visual span
measure weights on factor 2

Factor 1 Factor 2

Auditorily presented tests

Digit span .745 .191
Phonologically dissimilar letters .795 -.416
Phonologically similar letters .832 .164
Visually presented tests
Digit span .852 .320
Phonologically dissimilar letters .787 .197
Phonologically similar letters .744 .372
Visuo-spatial pattern recall .211 .873

Table 3. Correlations between factor scores representing verbal

span or visuo-spatial span and vocabulary learning speed

Items Verbal span Visuo-spatial span

Strict scoring criterion

All -.52** -.18
Sentences -.42* -.19
Words -.54** -.12
Lenient scoring criterion
All -.48** -.19
Sentences -.38* -.21
Words -.52** -.12

Note: Correlations are negative because superior performance in

the span tasks is indicated by a larger value, while superior perfor-
mance in the learning task is indicated by a smaller number of
errors.
*/?<.05, **p<.01.

Table 3 presents the relevant correlations; there was little difference between
the results, irrespective of the scoring criterion that was used for vocabulary
learning speed. Overall, the verbal span factor scores were correlated with vo-
cabulary learning, while the factor representing the nonverbal, visuo-spatial pat-
tern recall task was not correlated with vocabulary learning. The same pattern
of results was also obtained when word and sentence learning were considered
separately.
The principal components analysis indicated that the presentation modality of
the span tasks did not substantially affect the subjects' span scores. To confirm
the finding that presentation modality did not play a role, we conducted six
separate regression analyses (one for each row of Table 3), using as dependent
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Atkins & Baddeley: Working memory and vocabulary learning

Table 4. Mean performance on the verbal and nonverbal span tasks and the
vocabulary learning measures as a function of experience in learning langauges

Errors in vocabulary
learning
Auditory Visual
Experience verbal verbal Nonverbal Strict Lenient
Skilled (n = 4) 6.36(0.43) 7.03(0.77) 19.7(2.91) 10.1 (3.85) 6.6 (3.16)
Unskilled (n = 25) 6.02(0.94) 5.95(0.99) 18.4(3.18) 18.2(12.99) 13.2(11.39)

Note: Figures in parentheses indicate SD.

variables the average of the auditorily presented span tasks, the average of the
visually presented span tasks, and the visuo-spatial span task scores for each. In
all cases, either the average auditory or visual span measure was sufficient to
predict vocabulary learning speed. Visuo-spatial span did not figure as a signifi-
cant predictor in any of the models. So, for example, when word and sentence
learning were considered together and the strict spelling criterion was used (row
1 in Table 3), average visual verbal span, /?2 = 0.27, f(26) = 3.21, p< .01, and
average auditory verbal span, R2 = 0.24, t(26) = 2.95, p< .01, on their own were
effective predictors of learning speed, but visuo-spatial pattern span was not,
/?2 = 0.07, f(26) = 1.38, p> .1. However, when the visual and auditory verbal
span tasks were fitted in the same model, neither was a significant predictor
when the older was held constant: visual, /(26) = 1.4, p > . 1; verbal, r(26) = 0.88,
p > . 1. In other words, irrespective of which presentation modality was used to
assess verbal span, verbal span but not visuo-spatial span was a significant pre-
dictor of vocabulary learning speed.
Four of the subjects in the sample continued to study various languages after
leaving school and rated themselves as fluent or semifluent in at least two lan-
guages other than English. Table 4 presents a summary of the working memory
performance of these relatively skilled subjects compared with the other sub-
jects. The skilled subjects had longer verbal spans, as measured by the visually
presented span tasks, t(21) = -2.06, p = .048, thus replicating the polyglot study
of Papagno and Vallar (1995). However, the skilled subjects did not signifi-
cantly differ from the other subjects on the auditorily presented span tasks or
the visuo-spatial span task. Thus, there is only weak evidence from this small
subsample to suggest a relationship between verbal working memory span and
the propensity to pursue language-related studies. Skilled subjects appeared to
make fewer errors than the less skilled subjects during the vocabulary learn-
ing tasks. However, this difference was not significant when either the strict,
r(27) = 1.22, p > .1, or lenient, f(27) = 1.12, p > .1, scoring criterion was used.

Recall after one week

The second aim of the experiment was to examine the effects of errors during
original learning on recall after one week. For each subject, the average number
of errors made during learning was calculated for the words correctly and incor-
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Atkins & Baddeley: Working memory and vocabulary learning
rectly recalled after one week. The mean number of errors during the first week
of learning for unrecalled items (M = 2.65, SD=l .43) was significantly greater
than that for recalled items ( M = l . l l , SD = 0.53), f(28) = 12.2, p < .001. This
analysis could be criticized because different subjects correctly recalled different
proportions of the items in the second week and therefore varied in the extent
to which they contributed to the means for the correct and incorrect items. How-
ever, irrespective of the number of items that were correctly recalled in the
second week, all 29 subjects made more errors during the first week for the words
that they could not recall in the second week than they made for the words that
they could recall.
Gathercole and Baddeley (1990b, p. 453) suggested that children with low
phonological memory skills may not only take longer to learn new names, but
also forget those names more quickly once they have learned them. To test
whether a similar process might occur for adults, we examined the relationship
between the working memory span measures and the number of items recalled
after a week. All the subjects in this experiment learned the items to the same
criterion. Therefore, any differences in recall after one week would reflect for-
getting processes rather than the level of original learning. There was no signifi-
cant correlation between the number of items recalled after one week and the
average auditory verbal span (r = .29), the average visual verbal span (r = . 15),
or the visuo-spatial pattern recall span (r =. 17). Therefore, this study did not
support Gathercole and Baddeley's suggestion.

DISCUSSION

Phonological working memory span but not visuo-spatial span was reliably cor-
related with vocabulary learning. This result was not due to immediate retrieval
from a short-term memory buffer. In addition, the subjects were not discouraged
from using semantic strategies such as imagery to leam the foreign language
vocabulary items. Short-term span was significantly correlated with vocabulary
learning speed even when the vocabulary items were learned in the context of
short sentences, a condition that might have been expected to induce the subjects
to use semantic rather than phonological strategies for learning. Indeed, in dis-
cussions following the experiment, most of the subjects indicated that they had
used semantically based imagery strategies with varying degrees of success. The
results of this study indicate that, even when semantic strategies can be em-
ployed, phonological working memory is still an effective predictor of vocabu-
lary learning success.
Baddeley et al. (1988, Experiment 5) reported that control subjects performed
better at word-nonword learning when the items were presented visually than
when they were presented auditorily. This indicates that processes other than
phonological memory span may play a role during visual presentation. However,
the fact that phonological memory span is a reliable predictor of vocabulary
learning, even when the vocabulary items are presented visually, suggests that
subjects phonologically recode visually presented vocabulary items.
The lack of a significant correlation between visuo-spatial span and vocabu-
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Atkins & Baddeley: Working memory and vocabulary learning

lary learning supports the view that short-term memory consists of separate
verbal and nonverbal subsystems, with the verbal short-term memory system
being critical for vocabulary learning.

The relationship between phonological memory and vocabulary

How might phonological memory be implicated in the acquisition of vocabu-
lary? Let us first consider the processes necessary for the acquisition of vocabu-
lary in a first language and then discuss second language vocabulary acquisition.
Acquiring vocabulary items involves linking a novel phonological and/or lexical
sequence to its meaning. In the case of recognition vocabulary, the subject needs
to recognize enough of the novel structure to differentiate it, if necessary in the
appropriate context, from other known or novel items. This does not necessarily
involve an analysis of the whole item: for example, English readers of Russian
novels are familiar with the experience of recognizing the names of characters
without necessarily being able to reproduce them in full. In the case of produc-
tion vocabulary, however, accurate ordered recall is necessary. It is proposed
that this aspect of novel vocabulary learning depends on the capacity of the
phonological loop in ways that will be specified momentarily. In addition, the
learner must understand the meaning of the word and must be able to associate
the phonological or lexical form with this meaning.
In the case of first language vocabulary, initial learning involves largely con-
crete nouns that are relatively frequent and therefore available to virtually all
learners. However, this pattern is likely to change over time. Adults who score
high on vocabulary demonstrate an understanding of highly abstract words,
words that occur rarely and whose meaning is acquired indirectly through con-
text. Vocabulary at this level depends heavily on level of education, for expo-
sure to the new words, and general intelligence, for the capacity to infer meaning
from context. Consequently, one might expect an association between vocabu-
lary and phonological loop capacity to be high in young children but to weaken
gradually as other variables become important (Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, &
Baddeley, 1992). Indeed, subjects with a developmental impairment in phono-
logical memory may nevertheless subsequently develop excellent vocabulary
skills (Baddeley, 1993).
In the case of second language learning, using formal educational methods,
subjects have a broadly equivalent exposure to vocabulary, with the result that
differences in phonological loop capacity may show through more clearly. With
regard to production vocabulary, the need to acquire phonologically novel forms
may represent a substantial component of the learning task, with the result that
such differences may prove to be of real practical significance.
What is the mechanism whereby the phonological loop plays this role? Brown
and Hulme (1996) suggested that a temporary phonological store could play a
crucial role in the acquisition of long-term phonological representations. The
need for such an intermediate store is driven by two conflicting requirements of
the system. The first is to accumulate long-term representations, which can in-
fluence subsequent performance; the second is to have a system that is capable
of rapidly encoding information, much of which may be comparatively novel.
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Atkins & Baddeley: Working memory and vocabulary learning

They suggested that the phonological short-term store performs this temporary
holding function, which then allows the information to be used to modify the
longer term system gradually.
Evidence for such an interaction comes from studies of the role of word-
likeness in the capacity for repeating back unfamiliar nonwords. Gathercole
(1995) observed that the capacity for the immediate repetition of nonwords is
enhanced when they are comparatively word-like in structure, indicating a clear
influence of prior long-term phonological learning on immediate memory. How-
ever, the capacity to repeat back items that are low in word-likeness provides a
significantly better predictor of subsequent vocabulary acquisition than is pro-
vided by the repetition of items that are highly word-like. This is because the
capacity to repeat back atypical items places a greater demand on the capacity
of the temporary phonological store. We conclude that the acquisition of second
language vocabulary depends on the capacity to develop new, long-term phono-
logical representations, and that these in turn depend jointly on existing phonol-
ogy and the capacity to store novel forms within the phonological loop.
The design of this experiment did not address the question of the develop-
mental precedence of skilled phonological working memory or skill at learning
vocabulary. However, evidence from Gathercole and her colleagues (Gather-
cole & Baddeley, 1989, 1990a; Gathercole et al., 1992) indicated that working
memory span probably comes first developmentally. Gathercole et al. (1992)
showed that the correlation between phonological working memory span at age
4 and vocabulary score at age 5 was higher than the reverse correlation in nor-
mal children, suggesting a causal relationship between phonological memory
and vocabulary knowledge. Gathercole and Baddeley (1990a, p. 336) proposed
that a deficient phonological working memory in language-disordered children
"could play a central role in their disordered language development." Clearly
this does not mean that people with poor phonological memory cannot learn
new vocabularies. However, it does suggest that phonological span might be
useful as a diagnostic tool for identifying students who require specially tailored
vocabulary learning programs.

Errors in learning and long-term memory

How might we interpret the fact that the vocabulary items that were remembered
after one week tended to be those items for which few errors had been made
during the original learning? One way to explain this result is to argue that
every retrieval attempt, even those where an incorrect item was retrieved, was
a learning event. Because a dropout procedure was used, by the end of the
original learning all the items had been translated correctly the same number of
times. However, the items differed in terms of the number of errors that were
made during learning, and since all errors were followed by the presentation of
the correct translation, the items also differed in the number of times the correct
answer had been studied.
If the number of study presentations was the critical determinant of how well
an item was recalled, then items for which many errors were made during the
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Atkins & Baddeley: Working memory and vocabulary learning

original learning should have been better recalled after one week. Alternatively,
if the number of correct retrievals was critical, then there should have been no
difference in recall between the items. But the items for which many errors had
been made during the original learning were recalled worse after one week. This
suggests that both the successful and unsuccessful retrieval attempts were learn-
ing trials. That is, the subject had learned not only the correct response, but also
a series of competing, incorrect responses that reduced the likelihood of subse-
quent successful recall. This interpretation is consistent with other studies that
have demonstrated retrieval-based learning (Allen et al., 1969; Bjork, 1975;
Gardiner et al., 1973; Hogan & Kintsch, 1971) and with demonstrations that
learning procedures that minimize errors may be particularly effective (Badde-
ley & Wilson, 1994; Wilson et al., 1994).
Other interpretations of this result are, however, also possible. For example,
the subjects may have used idiosyncratic associations to some of the foreign
language vocabulary items. These associations could help learning so that fewer
errors would be made during the learning of those vocabulary items. In addition,
prior learning might also aid long-term retention. By contrast, the last few items
to be learned may have conflicted with some existing individual language habit
and were therefore subject to proactive interference during learning causing
more errors (Melton & Irwin, 1940). If this prior language habit were reasserted
during the retention interval, these items would be more likely to be forgotten
(Underwood, 1957). Although it is impossible to decide between these theoreti-
cal interpretations, the analysis of long-term retention as a function of errors
during original learning has at least one clear practical implication: items that
are difficult to learn should be overleamed to ensure long-term retention.

Other implications and issues

What are the practical implications of our main observation of a robust correla-
tion between our measures of verbal immediate memory span and speed of
vocabulary acquisition? First of all, our findings extend previous studies that
related phonological short-term memory to language learning: we employed a
distributed learning technique that was designed to optimize the speed of vocab-
ulary acquisition. As such, our results suggest that techniques that attempt to
take full advantage of semantic coding show a substantial contribution of phono-
logical memory to performance. They not only implicate the phonological loop
in second language learning, but also offer the possibility of developing a useful
predictor of probable success.
The lack of any marked difference in the size of the correlation as a function
of the nature of the span material (or of its modality of presentation) is consis-
tent with our initial hypothesis. That is, the crucial role in vocabulary learning
is played by the phonological store that underlies the recall of verbal materials,
regardless of presentation modality (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). The correlations
are substantial but not huge, accounting for between 15 and 27% of the variance.
It should, however, be bome in mind that our subject sample was not typical of
the population at large, consisting as it did of people who volunteered to take
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Atkins & Baddeley: Working memory and vocabulary learning

part in a moderately lengthy language learning experiment. Most had had some
previous experience of second language learning, and it seems unlikely that our
sample included very many subjects who were below the average in language
learning aptitude. Such a reduction in the range of the sample is likely to reduce
the magnitude of any observed relationship.
Over and above these factors, performance is clearly going to depend on other
variables relating to both the semantic characteristics of the item being acquired
and transfer from earlier learning. An obvious semantic variable is the concrete-
ness or imageability of the concept, with vocabulary relating to concrete objects
being acquired more readily than that referring to abstract and unfamiliar con-
cepts. Furthermore, analogies with existing learning also influence the rate of
new learning. Hence, an English speaker acquiring the German word for dog
benefits from the similarity between hund and hound.
Another point to note is that our study concentrated on the acquisition and
recall of words in the second language, a task that places particular demands on
phonological encoding and retrieval. We would expect lower correlations if the
task were to learn to recognize foreign words and to pronounce their English
equivalents (cf. Ellis & Beaton, 1993). Whether the acquisition of grammar is
well predicted by phonological memory measures remains an open question.
However, the preliminary results are encouraging. Service (1992) found that a
nonword repetition task that relied on immediate memory was an effective pre-
dictor of a whole range of second language learning skills in young children.
Ellis and Sinclair (1996) obtained evidence that phonological immediate mem-
ory is an important component in the acquisition of new grammatical forms in
subjects learning Welsh as a second language. Although our results are encoura-
ging in extending the range of findings linking phonological immediate memory
to second language learning, many questions remain.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work, conducted while both authors were at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit,
Cambridge, UK, was supported by a scholarship under the Commonwealth Scholarship
and Fellowship Plan. We wish to thank Kevin Bird (University of New South Wales),
Daniel Wright (Bristol), and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and
assistance with the statistical analysis during the preparation of the manuscript.

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