Abstract
Learning new content and vocabulary in a foreign language can be particularly difficult. Yet, there are educational programs that require people to study in a language they are not native speakers of. For this reason, it is important to understand how these learning processes work and possibly differ from native language learning, as well as to develop strategies to ease this process. The current study takes advantage of emotionality-operationally defined as positive valence and high arousal-to improve memory. In two experiments, the present paper addresses whether participants have more difficulty learning the names of objects they have never seen before in their foreign language and whether embedding them in a positive semantic context can help make learning easier. With this in mind, we had participants (with a minimum of a B2 level of English) in two experiments (43 participants in Experiment 1 and 54 in Experiment 2) read descriptions of made-up objects-either positive or neutral and either in their native or a foreign language. The effects of language varied with the difficulty of the task and measure used. In both cases, learning the words in a positive context improved learning. Importantly, the effect of emotionality was not modulated by language, suggesting that the effects of emotionality are independent of language and could potentially be a useful tool for improving foreign language vocabulary learning.
Highlights
Our current study addresses the question of whether emotionality—positive valence and high arousal—affects word learning in a native and a foreign language
The focus was on using naturalistic materials and tests and to understand whether learning in a foreign language differs from learning in a native language
We focused on the effects of emotional context—here defined as positive valence and high arousal—during the process of learning new words attached to new content, here represented by novel objects
Summary
Our current study addresses the question of whether emotionality—positive valence and high arousal—affects word learning in a native and a foreign language. The focus is on cases in which one’s only experience with the to-be-learned object is a definition without having seen or touched that object in person. This question may seem odd, in reality, when we learn new information in academic settings, our experience with the content we learn is quite limited.
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