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Description
The public release of ChatGPT in late 2022 made an impact on many professional domains. Notwithstanding the many controversies surrounding Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), such as ethics, copyright, accountability, or ecology, we need to acknowledge an important and relevant feature of Large Language Models and chatbot systems built around them: their ability to produce mostly natural-sounding, smooth English prose. This ability makes AI Chatbots an attractive option in the learning (and teaching) of English, and thus a serious competitor to dictionaries seen as traditional learning (and teaching) aids, especially when it comes to vocabulary: the natural focus of lexicography and dictionaries. Effective use of dictionaries requires specific dictionary skills (e.g. Nesi, 1999), whereas AI Chatbots are generally believed to be straightforward and quick to use. A few recent studies have indeed found that ChatGPT may result in better student performance on English vocabulary tasks compared to traditional bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, at least for production tasks, if not always in reception (Lew et al., 2024; Ptasznik et al., 2024; Rees and Lew, 2024). These studies focused on immediate success, but we are not aware of any studies that would investigate vocabulary retention. It is quite possible that the ease and speed with which Chatbots facilitate the immediate completion of language-related tasks might not promote learning (a concern in fact we often hear from AI critics).
In our eLex 2025 presentation, we report on two ongoing studies looking beyond immediate success and at delayed retention. Both studies tested the reception and production of infrequent and semantically opaque English phrasal verbs (20 in Study One, 19 in Study Two). Polish students majoring in English were randomized to one of three tools and completed reception and production tasks focuses on phrasal verbs. Two to three weeks later they were re-tested, but now without access to any lexical tools. Study One tested the bilingual dictionary bab.la, the monolingual Collins Online Dictionary, and ChatGPT and found modest but significant and similar learning gains with all three tools in a reception task. For delayed production, ChatGPT was the only tool to result in significant learning. Study 2 used a larger sample (223 participants) and two different chatbots as well as the bilingual dictionary diki.pl which had been found effective in an earlier study (Lew et al., 2024). In delayed reception tests, the bilingual dictionary significantly outperformed both MS Copilot and Gemini, whereas for production, no significant differences were found between any of the tools, just an effect of the year of study. Our general tentative conclusion is that completing lexically oriented tasks with the help of AI chatbots does not seriously disadvantage longer-term vocabulary retention, compared to dictionaries.
