No abstract

Putting the principles of multisensory teaching into practice, this study investigated the effect of audio-visual vocabulary repetition on L2 sentence comprehension. Forty participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. A sensory-based model of instruction (i.e., emotioncy) was used to teach a list of unfamiliar vocabularies to the two groups. Following the instruction, the experimental group repeated the instructed words twice, while the control group received no vocabulary repetition. Afterward, their electrophysiological neural activities were recorded through electroencephalography while doing a sentence acceptability judgment task with 216 sentences under acceptable (correct) and unacceptable (pragmatically violated) conditions. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), and a Bayesian repeated-measures ANOVA were used to compare the behavioral and neurocognitive responses [N400 as the main language-related event-related brain potential (ERP) effect] of the two groups. The results showed no significant N400 amplitude difference in favor of any of the groups. The findings corroborated the ineffectiveness of two repetitions preceded by multisensory instruction on L2 sentence comprehension.

Introduction: Delving into the prominent role of emotions and senses in the realm of language is not something new in the field. Thereupon, the newly developed notion of emotioncy has been introduced to the foreign language education to underscore the role of sense-induced emotions in the process of language learning and teaching. Methods: The present study implemented ERPs to provide evidence to the significance of employing emosensory instructional strategies in teaching vocabulary items. Hence, eighteen female participants were randomly instructed six English nouns toward which they had no prior knowledge and received no instruction for the other three words. Then, while the participants’ EEG was being recorded, they took a sentence comprehension task. Results: Behavioral results demonstrated significant differences among the avolved, the exvolved, and the involved nouns. However, ERP analyses of target words indicated the modulations of N100 and N480 components while no significant effect was observed at P200. Further, the analysis of sensory N100 for the critical words revealed no significant effect. Conclusion: In conclusion, the emotioncy-based language instruction could affect neural correlates of emotional word comprehension from the early stages of EEG recording. The findings of this study can shed light on the importance of including senses and emotions in language teaching, learning, and testing, along with materials development.