Abstract In this journal, Tinkham (1993) in two experiments found that learning words grouped in semantic sets interferes with the learning of the words. Tinkham found that if learners are given words which share a common superordinate concept (such as words for clothes) in list form, they are learned slower than words which do not have a common superordinate concept. This finding suggests that we should not give wordlists to our learners which have words that come from the same semantic set, but should be asking them to learn words semantically unrelated to each other. The present study, a close replication of Tinkham's, used Japanese words paired with artificial words and found a main effect against learning semantically related words at the same time, replicating Tinkham's findings. It can be tentatively concluded from these two papers that presenting students with wordlists of new words in semantic clusters, rather than in unrelated word groups, can interfere with learning. Following a discussion of the research design and some of its limitations there is some comment on current research methodology.
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