From infancy onwards, humans display an innate motivation to acquire language and to communicate. We start acquiring words as babies and continue to do so throughout our lives. In fact, children are thought to learn over 3000 new words each year. However, relatively little work has focused on why we are motivated to learn words, particularly when it comes to adolescents.

Adolescence is a period of great neurological change and sensitivity to learning. It's also marked by changes in reading behaviours. Whilst children become skilled readers between the ages of 10 and 18, this period is also associated with motivational changes in reading, with teens frequently showing a disinclination to read for pleasure. This change often coincides with the transition from primary to secondary school. Policy makers are keen to motivate adolescents to read for pleasure, arguing that it would improve not just literacy outcomes, but also result in substantial economic and societal benefit.

Recent research has shown that adults find learning words to be intrinsically rewarding, and that this intrinsic reward facilitates the entrance of new words into long-term memory. In their latest paper, our researchers of the month, Professor Saloni Krishnan and Professor Pablo Ripollés, set out to establish whether the same is true for children and teens.

Summary

So, what is intrinsic reward?

An extrinsic reward is external to us. We could be given money every time we do a particular thing, or we might feel good about ourselves when someone tells us “well done”. Extrinsic rewards are important and help to keep our levels of motivation high. In contrast, intrinsic rewards happen without external feedback.

For the majority of time when we are learning or doing something new, we don't receive external feedback. Yet something motivates us to keep learning. Why? Well, in our brains, there is a close relationship between our reward and memory systems. Dopamine is one of the most important neurotransmitters in the brain and it is released when we find something pleasurable or rewarding. When dopamine is released, it becomes easier for whatever we are doing to enter our long-term memory. In the case of learning, when we find a learning experience to be pleasurable, our reward network is activated, releasing dopamine, and this actually enhances our ability to learn and remember.

Studies have shown that when we learn on our own, and we are aware that we’ve learned something, this experience is intrinsically rewarding. And if the experience is intrinsically rewarding, and dopamine is released, we also end up learning it better.

What did the study show?

The research team asked 345 children and young people aged 10-18 to extract word meanings from sentences. Participants were presented with sentences which contained novel words. For example, they were given a nonsense word with no known meaning, such as "Kiche". They were then provided with a couple of sentences, such as, "Old people sometimes lose their kiche" and, "Mina has beautiful long kiche." They were asked to read the sentence, then type out the meaning of the word (which here, they might have deduced to be "hair"), before rating how much they enjoyed working out what it meant, how tired they were and how confident they were in the meaning that they ascribed to it. They did not receive any explicit feedback. The young people were also asked to recall word meanings the following day. This data was analysed to see whether adolescents show the same reward patterns as adults, and whether they experience the same 'buzz' during learning. As a control, in some of the sentences, it was not possible to extract any word meaning. In these examples, the ‘correct’ answer was to note that a meaning could not be ascribed.

The results showed clear evidence of an increase in pleasure during successful word learning, and that young people's experience of reward remained fairly stable across the age range of participants. Interestingly, a sense of enjoyment was only experienced when they were reading sentences where word meaning could be worked out, not upon completion of the control questions. It seems that reward systems in the brain were stimulated by the acquisition of tangible, new knowledge, rather than by the challenge of problem solving in and of itself.

So, what makes word learning intrinsically rewarding? Firstly, the experiment allowed participants to generate and test a prediction, something that is known to create optimal conditions for learning. Like adults, children and adolescents feel pleasure when successfully engaging internal learning processes. Professor Krishnan and Professor Ripollés note that this may be due to an increase in feelings of self-efficacy and confidence, and a reduction in feelings of uncertainty, when the young people felt that they had learned something. For learning experiences to be intrinsically rewarding, we need to feel sufficiently confident that we can learn or have learned.

Implications

"Word learning is pleasurable for children and adults. This is an important finding as it will ultimately allow us to develop strategies to drive engagement with language and reading, optimising learning experiences in childhood."

From a research perspective, we don’t yet know much about how to target intrinsic reward when it comes to language learning and so our researchers of the month will be investigating the practical implications of this study in the future. However, they do have some top tips which might help to boost children's sense of intrinsic reward when it comes to reading and word learning.

When reading with children, take time to stop and consider word meanings. Talking to children about what they think new words mean and helping develop their confidence in ascribing meanings to words can broaden their vocabulary and promote word learning.

Give children choice and a sense of agency. Providing variety and options when it comes to books, reading interventions and programmes is known to boost young people's sense of enjoyment and motivation.

Capitalise on their interests. Talking to children and young people about subjects that interest them can help to build new vocabulary, encourage them to make connections between words and may nudge them to build certainty and confidence around language within this specific domain. Foster things that they find rewarding. As a general rule, we tend to be very good at doing this with younger children, but frequently less so as they get older. Keep going!

Model an enjoyment of reading and word learning. Signal when you learn a new words. Be explicit about it!

Talk about the nuances of words. Building a wide ranging vocabulary around emotions and experiences can help to cultivate empathy and a greater capacity to navigate social and emotional challenges.