This page provides the main experimental tasks used in the paper "Anchoring does not boost the benefit of contextual diversity for learning word forms or generalising learned meanings to new contexts". A pre-print can be accessed here: https://psyarxiv.com/sur9e/,
Corresponding author Dr Jo Taylor, University College London
The individual difference measures are not shared since they were adapted from tasks reported in https://www.lextale.com/ and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-85907-x#Sec14 and can be accessed from there. We were not licensed to share our adapted versions.
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This is the first training task in which participants read sentences that contained target pseudowords. Each pseudoword appeared once in a sentence. Participants read five blocks of eight sentences, one for each of the eight pseudowords. The sentences for each pseudoword were drawn from the same context (e.g. all about animals). Participants read 40 sentences in total. The trial and block order of the sentences were randomised, and breaks were provided periodically to minimise fatigue. There were eight comprehension questions, one for each pseudoword, interspersed in between the sentences to ensure attention was kept. These questions required a forced-choice true or false response. Pseudowords had easy (“bamper”) or hard (“uzide”) to decode spelling-sound mappings. Each participant was trained on half the total number of items (8 of 16 items) in one of four versions of the experiment to counterbalance the factors of decoding ease and contextual diversity across participants.
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This is the second training task in which participants read sentences that contained target pseudowords. Again, participants read five blocks of eight sentences, one for each of the eight pseudowords. For four of the eight pseudowords, the sentences were drawn from the same context. For the remaining four, each sentence described a different context (e.g. animals, law, schools).
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This task assessed participants' knowledge of the orthographic form of the pseudowords. This task required participants to judge whether the presented word matched a learned word by pressing 'f' or 'j' on their keyword for a correctly or incorrectly spelled word, respectively.
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This task assessed participants' knowledge of the word meanings of the pseudowords. This task required participants to select the correct pseudoword to fill in the gap of a presented sentence.
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