In Fall 2022, a team of 3 UAC Psychology undergraduate students were awarded an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Grant for their Empirical Grant proposal “The effect of verbal vs non-verbal auditory distractors on encoding constructed vocabulary in long-term memory”. They submitted their proposal for IRB ethical approval over the winter break, and were able to start implementing their experiment protocol and collecting data by the start of the spring semester. Despite several technical difficulties and other challenges, they were able to test close to 60 participants within less than 2 months, so that they could analyze and present their preliminary data at the IGC Research Showcase in May 2023! The students are continuing their data collecting this fall semester to reach their original target number of 100 participants and see if they can publish their results in a journal.

The aim of the project was to test the effects of Music vs ASMR distractors compared to Quiet, in both Verbal vs. Non-Verbal conditions on long term memory for newly learned vocabulary in an unfamiliar artificial language. The verbal distractors were presented in the participants preferred/dominant language (either English or Korean). The results showed that verbal distractors specifically, had a significant negative effect on memory for the newly learned vocabulary. Based on these results we could conclude that it might benefit students not to study with music in the background especially if the music has lyrics in their native language.