Abstract
We examined two theories of the mechanisms that enable error correction via corrective feedback. One theory focuses on enhancing the encoding of corrective feedback (corrective feedback-encoding facilitation account). The other is the recursive reminding theory, which considers memory integration between an initial event with error generation and a subsequent event involving correct answer feedback. The Japanese idiom pronunciation task was used in two experiments, in which it was manipulated whether the generated errors were visually presented, as well as corrective feedback. In an immediate retest after a five-minute retention interval, participants recalled their errors in the initial test and their correct answers. In addition, error trials fell into three ordinal confidence categories (low, medium, and high). First, a typical hypercorrection was replicated in which higher-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected. However, this was not observed when errors from the initial test were not recalled in the final test, which does not align with the corrective feedback-encoding facilitation account. The second issue was whether additional experience with the generated errors would enhance the error correction. Given the recursive reminding theory, the additional experience of errors should reinforce the mutual dependence between an error and the correct answer provided by feedback, improving cued recall performance later. This prediction is supported. The present findings suggest that the recursive reminding theory can explain the benefits of generating errors when learning through corrective feedback and can also be expanded to understand the hypercorrection effect.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
The posterior power calculation results were 0.79 (participants = 30, within-participant effect = 0.52, two-tailed pairwise comparisons using an alpha of 0.05).
Attention should be paid to cases where the same error as the initial one is repeated in the final test. In such cases, recall of the initial error is essentially erroneous. If this frequently occurred in the high-confidence trials, it would be understandable if no hypercorrection effect was observed. However, the repetition of the same error rarely occurs. The number of trials was M = 1.3 (SD = 1.6) in the no-error-reminding condition and M = 1.1 (SD = 1.7) in the error-reminding condition. When the data were aggregated across participants, such trials were more likely to occur in low-confidence trials than in high-confidence trials (no-error-reminding, low = 26 trials, medium = 8 trials, high = 5 trials; error-reminding, low = 20 trials, medium = 8 trials, high = 4 trials). Therefore, error repetition cannot be considered the cause of the lack of hypercorrection effect.
We calculated the number of trials in which the same error was repeated in the initial and final tests. The number of trials was M = 2.2 (SD = 2.1) in the no-error-reminding condition and M = 2.0 (SD = 1.7) in the error-reminding condition, similar to Experiment 1. Error repetition was more likely to occur in lower-confidence trials than in higher-confidence trials (no-error-reminding, low = 27 trials, medium = 27 trials, high = 20 trials; error-reminding, low = 37 trials, medium = 18 trials, high = 12 trials).
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Takashi Morotomi for his helpful discussion and suggestions.
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This research was supported by a JSPS KAKENHI (16K04331) grant.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and designed the experiments. NI and IT prepared the material. NI collected the raw data and performed the data analyses with IT and SK. NI wrote the draft of the manuscript. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.
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Iwaki, N., Takahashi, I. & Kaneko, S. How does error correction occur during lexical learning?. Psychological Research 88, 1272–1287 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-024-01937-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-024-01937-w