Comparison of teaching methods for the emergence and maintenance of untaught relations in foreign language vocabulary acquisition: A systematic replication

Yamaguchi and colleagues compared three ways to teach foreign words to college students.

One group practiced saying the foreign word when they heard the native word. Another group heard the foreign word and said the native word back. The third group looked at a picture and said the foreign word for it.

The team used an alternating-treatments design so each student tried all three methods.

Native-to-foreign intraverbal training and foreign-tact training created more new, untaught word pairs than foreign-to-native intraverbal training.

Maintenance scores were mixed. Some relations stuck, others faded, but the first two methods still held an edge.

Cortez et al. (2020) ran a near-copy study with preschoolers and got the same winner: tact and native-to-foreign drills beat listener-only drills.

May et al. (2016) showed the reverse path—listener and intraverbal drills first, then emergent tacts appeared—yet they worked with 4-year-olds, not adults.

Murphy et al. (2019) pitted computer against tabletop equivalence lessons for autistic kids and also found format matters; speed and accuracy shifted with the teaching style, just like here.

If you want clients to use new words they have never been directly taught, start with native-to-foreign intraverbals or picture-tacts. Skip the foreign-to-native drill as the first step—it produces fewer spill-over skills. Rotate formats within the same session; the alternating design itself keeps responding sharp.