Abstract
Emotions have crucial influence on vocabulary learning and text comprehension. However, whether morphosyntactic learning is influenced by emotional conditions has remained largely unclear. In this study, we investigated how induced positive and negative emotions affect the learning of morphosyntactic rules in a foreign language. It was found that negative emotion increased the accuracy and efficiency of syntactic learning, but had no significant effect on the learning of morphological marking rules. Positive emotion was not found to be significantly associated with learning outcomes. The findings shed light on the effects of affective states on the structural aspects of foreign language learning.
Highlights
Emotion has a profound impact on our judgments and various cognitive processes [1], coloring how we perceive the outside world
Language learning is closely associated with the basic cognitive processes such as perception, categorization, attention and memory [5], making it reasonable to assume that emotion may have influence on language learning as well
This study examined the effect of induced emotions on morphosyntactic learning as measured by accuracy and reaction times (RTs)
Summary
Emotion has a profound impact on our judgments and various cognitive processes [1], coloring how we perceive the outside world. The influence of emotion on psychological function and information processing has been documented in several domains such as perception [2], reasoning and judgment [3], memory storage and retrieval [4]. Language learning is closely associated with the basic cognitive processes such as perception, categorization, attention and memory [5], making it reasonable to assume that emotion may have influence on language learning as well. Typical morphosyntactic features are gender, case, number and person, which are crucial to the architecture of syntax [12]. While children seem to be able to learn first language morphosyntax with ease, adult foreign language learners often have persistent problems with morphosyntactic features [13], [14], either having difficulty understanding them or making frequent errors
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