Effective use of pictures as extra stimulus prompts

Past research on learning single words in the presence of pictures has suggested that the pictures can function as a blocking element which inhibits the development of an association between the written word and its spoken response. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the extra stimulus pictorial prompts can be arranged in a different manner which does not inhibit the learning of the words. Three presentation techniques were investigated using samples (N = 12) of kindergarten children: matching, matching with the fading of the pictorial stimulus prompts, and feedback cueing. The results showed that, in general, the best learning occurred in the absence of the pictorial prompts, that is, when the words were presented alone. In the case of the feedback cueing condition, however, this technique neutralised the blocking effect of the pictures and the performance was as good as the word-alone condition.