Basque Center on Brain, Language and Cognition, Donostia, Spain.
Department of Social Sciences and Law, UPV/EHU, Donostia, Spain.
PLoS One. 2020 Oct 7;15(10):e0240252. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240252. eCollection 2020.
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.
学习外语中的新知识和词汇可能特别困难。然而，有一些教育项目要求人们用非母语学习。因此，了解这些学习过程是如何运作的，以及它们可能与母语学习有何不同，以及制定策略来简化这个过程是很重要的。本研究利用情绪（操作性定义为正效价和高唤醒）来提高记忆。在两项实验中，本文探讨了参与者是否更难学习他们从未见过的外语物体的名称，以及将它们嵌入积极的语义语境中是否有助于使学习更容易。考虑到这一点，我们让参与者（英语水平至少为 B2 级）参加了两项实验（实验 1 中有 43 名参与者，实验 2 中有 54 名参与者），阅读虚构物体的描述——无论是积极的还是中性的，无论是用母语还是外语。语言的影响随着任务和测量的难度而变化。在两种情况下，在积极的语境中学习单词都能提高学习效果。重要的是，情绪的影响不受语言的调节，这表明情绪的影响独立于语言，并且可能是提高外语词汇学习的有用工具。
