Playing with fire: effects of negative mood induction and working memory on vocabulary acquisition

Abstract

We investigated the impact of emotions on learning vocabulary in an unfamiliar language to better understand affective influences in foreign language acquisition. Seventy native English speakers learned new vocabulary in either a negative or a neutral emotional state. Participants also completed two sets of working memory tasks to examine the potential mediating role of working memory. Results revealed that participants exposed to negative stimuli exhibited difficulty in retrieving and correctly pairing English words with Indonesian words, as reflected in a lower performance on the prompted recall tests and the free recall measure. Emotional induction did not change working memory scores from pre to post manipulation. This suggests working memory could not explain the reduced vocabulary learning in the negative group. We argue that negative mood can adversely affect language learning by suppressing aspects of native-language processing and impeding form-meaning mapping with second language words.

Attitudinal bias, individual differences, and second language speakers’ interactional performance

“…Contrary to predictions based on social psychological research with native speakers (Kang & Rubin, 2009;Rubin, 1992) and with bilinguals and L2 learners (Hu & Su, 2015;Miller et al, 2018;Paladino et al, 2009), no general effect of attitudinal bias was detected in this study for L2 speakers' comprehension of an interlocutor's personal narrative or for speakers' responses to recasts. In terms of listening comprehension, the most consistent evidence for attitudinal effects has thus far come from research with native speakers, whose comprehension is measured through a cloze test administered immediately after listening tasks (Rubin, 2002(Rubin, , 2012.…”

“…A more plausible explanation, however, might be related to the delay between speakers' exposure to a biasing opinion and a test of their comprehension. In fact, 15 minutes might represent a boundary condition for revealing sustained effects of affective or emotional factors on cognitive processing (Miller et al, 2018;Pessoa, 2009), so expecting that attitudinal bias would strongly impact L2 speakers' recall about 1.5 hours after being exposed to a biased opinion might have been unrealistic.…”

“…Besides time delay, existing literature offers at least two plausible explanations for the absence of strong, general effects of attitudinal bias on L2 speakers' linguistic performance in this study. Miller et al (2018) reported that paired-associate learning of new L2 words was disrupted for participants after viewing negative videos (clips from horror films), compared to a neutral condition (clips of scenery), but only in terms of participants' access to the semantic knowledge in their native language. They reasoned that a negative bias may have disrupted the process of integration of new information with existing knowledge structures.…”

“…They reasoned that a negative bias may have disrupted the process of integration of new information with existing knowledge structures. If attitudes mostly impact the creation and integration of new lexical form-meaning mappings (Miller et al, 2018), then it is unsurprising that there was no pronounced effects of attitudinal bias on the deployment of existing linguistic knowledge by these advanced L2 speakers.…”

“…In a study set in an Italian-German bilingual community in Italy, Paladino et al (2009) explored the effect of stereotype threat (i.e., a negative judgment about a social group) on Italian-dominant speakers' performance in German (their L2). These speakers underperformed on written and oral tests of German after a negative stereotypical judgment about the German language abilities of their ethnic group was voiced explicitly and even when this sentiment was only implied (see also Miller, Fox, Moser, & Godfroid, 2018). More recently, Taylor Reid et al (2018) showed that English listeners evaluating oral performance by L2 speakers significantly downgraded their ratings of these speakers when listeners heard a negative statement about these speakers' speaking ability, compared when no such statement was made.…”