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| Arbre Image: pixabay.com |
Annette de Groot explains that this is a common strategy for remembering words, the success of which is supported by numerous studies. It combines using knowledge of your native language words with a mental image. To give an example, to remember the word in Italian for night (notte), you could imagine having a naughty night out. Another example was supplied by a teacher on Facebook when I asked for distinctive input - she said she encourages pupils to remember the French for swimming pool (piscine), by thinking that it's something you might (inadvisedly) piss in.
The keyword idea can apparently be traced back to 1862 when the Reverend J.H. Bacon described how he learned the French word for tree (arbre). He thought of the arbor at the bottom of his garden which was shaded by a tree. In this case arbor was the keyword. Atkinson and Raugh (1975) coined the term keyword when they carried out laboratory studies on the method. They explained that you needed an "acoustic link" and an "imagery link" to help recall the word. You could easily argue, by the way, that this is an example of dual coding whereby you exploit both the phonological loop and visuo-spatial sketch pad of working memory to help leave a trace in long-term memory, if you follow that common multi-storage model of memory (Baddeley).
In a second stage of this technique Raugh and Atkinson (1975) employed the term verbiage to describe how you can construct a sentence in which the keyword and the translation of the target language word are related to each other. De Groot gives an example of this. While staying in Italy she needed scissors and prepared to ask her neighbour for a pair. She looked up scissors in her Italian dictionary and found forbice. She then spontaneously constructed the Dutch sentence Een schaar is verboden voor kinderen ("Scissors are forbidden for children"). Subsequently she could easily recall forbice when she went to her neighbour's because for her the Dutch word verboden ("forbidden") vaguely resembles the word forbice. De Groot explains that even this vague phonological resemblance and the use of an L1 sentence helped her remember.
Now, you might well argue that this way of learning new words is a bit marginal. I would agree. More common practices such as pairing words with pictures or their translation are more productive, not to mention just explaining or discovering vocabulary while reading and listening to texts. But from a teacher's point of view it might be a little refinement to your practice, or one that you use already and could exploit more.
Here are a few more examples de Groot mentions, drawing on Beaton et al (2005).
French
hérisson (hedgehog) - imagine it looks like your HAIRY SON
Spanish
mosca (fly) - imagine flies invading Moscow
arroz (rice) - imagine ARROWS landing in your bowl of rice
vacca (cow) - imagine a cow cleaning a filed with a VACUUM
Russian
glaz (eye) - imagine you had a GLASS eye.
There are more French examples in this interesting blog by William Alexander called The Memory Palace.
I recommend the de Groot book (paperback edition publshed in 2015) as a very clear, meticulous and highly referenced summary of a whole range of issues to do with language learning and the bilingual brain. Not for the faint-hearted at nearly 500 pages) and I have only dipped in so far.
References
Atkinson, R.C. and Raugh, M.R. (1975). The appilcation of the mnemonic keyword method to the acquisition of Russian vocabulary. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 104, 126-133.
Beaton, A. et al (2005). Facilitation of receptive and productive foreign vocabulary learning using the keyword method. Memory, 13, 458-471.
de Groot, A. (2011). Language and Cognition in Bilinguals and Multilinguals (Routledge).
Raugh, M.R. and Atkinson, R.C. (1975). A mnemonic method for learning a second-language viocabulary. Journal of Educational Psychology, 67, 1-16.
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