Learning new words’ emotional meanings in the contexts of faces and sentences

Abstract

Language is a powerful vehicle for expressing emotions, although the process by which words acquire their emotional meaning remains poorly understood. This study investigates how words acquire emotional meanings using two types of associative contexts: faces and sentences. To this end, participants were exposed to pseudowords repeatedly paired either with faces or with sentences expressing the emotions of disgust, sadness, or neutrality. We examined participants’ acquisition of meanings by testing them in both within-modality (e.g., learning pseudowords with faces and testing them with a new set of faces with the target expressions) and cross-modality generalization tasks (e.g. learning pseudowords with faces and testing them with sentences). Results in the generalization tests showed that the participants in the Face Group acquired disgust and neutral meanings better than participants in the Sentence Group. In turn, participants in the Sentence Group acquired the meaning of sadness better than their counterparts in the Face Group, but this advantage was only manifested in the cross-modality test with faces. We conclude that both contexts are effective for acquiring the emotional meaning of words, although acquisition with faces is more versatile or generalizable.*

Foreign faces facilitating specific emotional connotation acquisition for L2 words

“…Results of the present partially replicated the previous research on emotional connotation acquisition for L1 words (Gu et al, 2021). Participants in the present study matched newly learned L2 words with disgusted new faces more accurately than sad new faces regardless of the social-cultural identity congruency between the faces they saw in the learning blocks and in the tests, showing the same pattern as participants in the previous study learning new L1 words.…”

“…Previously, emotional connotation acquisition for L1 words was examined using an associative learning paradigm (Gu et al, 2021). Faces and sentences expressing disgusting and sad connotations were compared for their effectiveness in acquiring emotional connotations for L1 pseudowords.…”

ERP evidence for emotion-specific congruency effects between sentences and new words with disgust and sadness connotations

“…These results were possible because the methodology used in the learning session (see also Gu et al, 2021Gu et al, , 2022. Participants achieved high response accuracy in the within-and cross-modality tests, which suggests that rather than merely associating the new words with specific faces, they acquired the corresponding emotions expressed by those faces and were able to apply the new words to refer to new materials.…”

“…We intentionally used a categorical design of new words (first two letters being "al" and "ro") to reduce the learning difficulty as the learning session was relatively short. Such a design was employed in our previous study as well (Gu et al, 2021(Gu et al, , 2022. The possibility that participants only pay attention to the first two letters could be ruled out since evidence suggests that lexical processing is not conducted in a letter-by-letter fashion (Shallice and Saffran, 1986).…”

“…To these aims, the study was divided into a learning session and an ERP recording session. In the learning session, an associative learning paradigm used in our previous studies (Gu et al, 2021(Gu et al, , 2022) was adopted for participants to acquire disgusting and sad connotations for pseudowords through repeatedly pairing them with emotional faces. Then the ERP session was carried out on the next day, in which all the pseudowords with acquired emotional connotations (herein new words) were paired with disgusting and sad sentences.…”