Do a fun language experiment!*
You can take part in a pilot experiment about language learning: It takes about 8 minutes (and is NOT an iterated learning experiment, although it looks a bit like one). I’ll release the results (and the hypothesis) right here on Replicated Typo.
* may not be loads of fun.
I’m not offended if the trial I just did gets excluded as an outlier – it’s probably just my short-term memory which is particularly bad. But seriously, exactly how much above chance do subjects usually perform on tasks like this??
(By the way, there’s a relatively well-known Szechuan dish called “Mapo Tofu”, so if you want to avoid familiarity effects among your potentially sinophile subjects you might want to exclude the mapo/mapu words. I found them to be much more salient than the other ones which probably interfered heavily with the task.)
The results will be revealed shortly! But the average score by the 5th test round is 76% correct (although this has dropped to 73% after adding your data!). About 40% of participants perform perfectly at the end. One of the problems in doing any experiment is deciding how hard it will be. I would have liked this to be longer with more training, but with an internet experiment you have to choose an experiment length you think people will stick with before getting bored. In the lab, you can be harsher.
Yes, choosing pseudo words for a global cohort is difficult. However, the words ‘mapo’ and ‘mapu’ don’t actually appear in this experiment! That you thought they did may be in line with my theory, however – more soon…