Notice of RetractionRevisiting the effects of audio and visual inputs of digital flashcards on memorization of Chinese new words by foreign beginners

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

Computer-based digital flashcards is one of the most popular self-study tools for memorization of Chinese new words by American college students who are learning Chinese as a foreign language. However, studies on the effects of this learning tool were scarce. Introducing a new concept — “referential stimuli” into the Dual Coding Theory (DCT hence forth) framework, the study acknowledged the existence of imagery text and textual image in addition to the conventional binary categorization of stimuli as either verbal or nonverbal and further hypothesized their functions. Multivariate ANCOVA used in this study permitted a simultaneous thorough examination of the effects of multimedia inputs of digital flashcards than 2-way ANCOVA used in the previous study (Zhu & Hong, 2005). New and the unexplained earlier findings were better understood from the perspective of the adapted version of DCT. Findings of this study had practical implications for development and applications of computer assisted language learning software. It concluded with a call for further investigations to examine the modified DCT framework.