Does narrator variability facilitate incidental word learning in the classroom?

Recent studies have revealed that presenting novel words across various contexts (i.e., contextual diversity) helps to consolidate the meaning of these words both in adults and children. This effect has been typically explained in terms of semantic distinctiveness (e.g., Semantic Distinctiveness Model, Jones et al., Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66(2), 115, 2012). However, the relative influence of other, non-semantic, elements of the context is still unclear. In this study, we examined whether incidental learning of new words in children was facilitated when the words were uttered by several individuals rather than when they were uttered by the same individual. In the learning phase, the to-be-learned words were presented through audible fables recorded either by the same voice (low diversity) or by different voices (high diversity). Subsequently, word learning was assessed through two orthographic and semantic integration tasks. Results showed that words uttered by different voices were learned better than those uttered by the same voice. Thus, the benefits of contextual diversity in word learning extend beyond semantic differences among contexts; they also benefit from perceptual differences among contexts.