Abstract

The principle and effect of redundancy seem to hinder learning in several domains. In this paper we report on a study that intended to find out whether such redundancy has also negative effects on the learning of idiomatic expressions in English as a Foreign Language. The subjects were two groups of college students exposed to two kinds of multimodal presentations: one group to on-screen text, narration and static images and the other to on-screen text andnarration. According to the redundancy principle, the former presentation contains a redundant element that would lead to cognitive overload. Although results show no major differences between the two groups concerning retention,in transfer differences were found that may be attributed to the semantic features of the vocabulary presented.