The integration and disintegration of newly learned meaningful words

Little is known about how newly learned words are retrieved from memory. Does retrieving the written form of a new word activate its meaning for example, or is it possible to retrieve single elements of a new word representation in isolation? Even less is known about whether it is possible to forget some elements of a newly learned word but retain others or whether such words are forgotten in an all-or-none manner. We addressed these questions by examining whether a statistical association exists between the retrieval successes of discrete elements from the same new word during cued recognition (retrieval dependency; Horner & Burgess, 2013) to assess whether elements constituting a new word representation are integrated and retrieved together from memory. Adult participants encoded new word triplets made from a pronounceable written nonword (e.g., flimir) presented alongside pictorial (e.g., balloon) and auditory (e.g., baby crying) elements representing meaning. Retrieval dependency was found immediately after learning showing that the elements rapidly formed an integrated associative structure underlying a new word representation. These associative connections maintained across 1 week of forgetting such that the word elements were forgotten together or not forgotten at all. This associative structure could however be disrupted by a mechanism akin to retrieval-induced forgetting during training, suggesting that newly formed word representations are susceptible to interference at least in the early stages of learning. These findings are not accounted for by existing theories of word learning or word representation which have tended to overlook memory retrieval and forgetting processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).