Professor Saloni Krishnan discusses findings from her recent work investigating the role of intrinsic reward in adolescent word learning.

From the moment we start babbling as infants, we’re on a relentless quest to acquire language. We soak up new words and their meanings with astonishing ease, often without needing explicit instruction or feedback. While much of the research has focused on the mechanics of memory and attention, the role of intrinsic rewards—those satisfying ‘aha’ moments—has remained in the shadows.

Recent research has revealed that adults get little bursts of satisfaction when they master new words. This intrinsic reward doesn’t just make learning fun; it also helps lock new vocabulary into long-term memory. Our new paper focused on whether such bursts of intrinsic reward would be observed during adolescence.

Adolescence is a time of dramatic brain development, particularly in areas linked to reward processing. Intriguingly, older adolescents (aged 15-18) have shown remarkable improvements in various cognitive tasks when trained, outperforming younger teens and adults. This suggests that late adolescence could be an important window for educational interventions. Therefore, we thought understanding the interplay between reward and word learning during these years could provide crucial insights.

In our study, we tested 345 children and adolescents aged 10-18 to assess if they experienced enjoyment when learning new words in context. Our findings were striking. Adolescents reported a heightened sense of enjoyment when successfully learning new words, demonstrating that the link between reward and learning is strong across this age range. However, unlike adults, this enjoyment did not translate into improved long-term memory for the new vocabulary – we think this may be due to the way we delivered the learning. We might need a sweet spot of difficulty for enjoyment to affect learning. Finally, we found that this experience of reward held across the ages of 10-18.

Understanding that intrinsic motivation can help educators create more engaging and rewarding learning environments. Indeed, here the motivation arises from the task itself, from making predictions about what words come next, and having those predictions confirmed. In our next steps, we are keen to understand whether everyone experiences intrinsic reward in the same way, or if the skills and knowledge we bring to the task alter our experience of feeling motivated.

You can find our paper here: Bains, A., Barber, A., Nell, T., Ripollés, P., & Krishnan, S. (2024). The role of intrinsic reward in adolescent word learning. Developmental science, e13513.   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13513