Repeating and remembering foreign language words : implications for language teaching systems

The current experiment examined the proposal that visible speech can help with a difficult signal such as listening to a foreign language. This work extends earlier work by examining whether presenting the face of the speaker improves the accuracy of repetitions of short phrases of a language participants had not heard before (Korean) as well as examining whether this manipulation facilitates performance on a subsequent old/new recognition task. The results showed that both repetition accuracy and the subsequent memory of foreign language phrases were improved by showing the speaker's face. The implication of this finding is that foreign language learning will benefit by using a presentation method that includes the visible speech of the speaker. Ways that this might be reasonably achieved using a computer interface are discussed.