Concept acquisition as a function of frequency of occurrence in verbal context

The experiment investigated concept acquisition as a function of number of occurrences of an unknown word in the context of a short story. Each of the nine stories was presented in one of six conditions (0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 12 occurrences of the word) to 120 college students. Five-item multiple-choice tests constructed to test concept acquisition showed adequate reliability, and for each word improvement was significant at the.01 level. Hence the learning of concepts from verbal context can be studied systematically, and the improvement, as in other learning experiments, appears to be a decreasing function of practice.