The Effect of Emotional Affect in L2 Lexical Learning
El efecto de la afectación emocional en el aprendizaje
léxico de una lengua segunda
María Turrero-García
Drew University
mturrerogarcia@drew.edu
Andie Faber
Princeton University
afaber@princeton.edu
RESUMEN
Estudios anteriores han revelado que las palabras con contenido
emocional tienen un efecto facilitador para la memoria de los hablantes
tanto de primera como de segunda lengua. Este estudio investiga cómo el
cariz emocional de una historia, activado a través de señales
audiovisuales, afecta la adquisición de elementos léxicos nuevos en
hablantes de español como segunda lengua. Los resultados de una tarea
de Asignación de Imagen y una de Nombramiento sugieren que los
contextos emocionales positivos tienen un efecto facilitador para el
reconocimiento y posterior evocación de los elementos meta en
comparación con contextos emocionales neutros y negativos. Para la
pedagogía de L2, estos resultados sugieren que la adquisición y retención
léxica se puede mejorar a través de la incorporación de materiales
didácticos con un componente emocional positivo.
Palabras clave: Adquisición de Segunda Lengua, Lingüística Aplicada, Emociones,
Aprendizaje Léxico
Revista Nebrija de Lingüística Aplicada a la Enseñanza de Lenguas (RNAEL) ISSN 1699-6569
Vol. 12 Núm. 25 (2018) doi: 10.26378/rnlael225220
Recibido: 4/08/2018 / Aprobado: 27/09/2018
Publicado bajo licencia de Creative Commons Reconocimiento Sin Obra Derivada 4.0 Internacional
ABSTRACT
Previous studies have found a facilitative memory effect for emotional
content words in both L1 and L2 speakers. The present study investigates
how emotional affect, activated through visual and auditory cues, effects
L2 Spanish speakers’ acquisition of novel lexical items. Data from Picture
Matching and Naming tasks suggest that positive emotional context has a
facilitative effect on learners’ recognition and recall of target items when
compared to the emotionally neutral or negative contexts. The implication
of these results in L2 pedagogy suggests that lexical acquisition and
retention can be enhanced by the incorporation of course materials with a
positive emotional drive.
Keywords: Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, Emotions, Lexical
Learning
1. INTRODUCTION
Over the past several decades, the relationship between affect and
cognition, development, and general learning has received
increasing attention (Mandler, 1989; Pekrun, 1992; Forgas, 2008;
Fiedler & Beier, 2014). In the field of Second Language Acquisition,
the role of affect has primarily focused on the effect of motivation
and anxiety (Krashen, 1982; Gardner, 1985, 2007; Dewaele, 2002;
Dörnyei, 1998, 2009; Ellis, 2015). In more recent years, there has
been an additional focus on the acquisition and processing of the
semantic content of emotional words by L1, L2 and simultaneous
bilingual speakers (Anooshian & Hertel, 1994; Altarriba & Bauer,
2004; Dewaele, 2008; Pavlenko, 2008; Ayiçiçegi(-Dinn) &
(Caldwell-)Harris, 2004, 2009; Lindquist et al., 2015). However,
little work has been done investigating the emotional context of the
environment during language learning. To begin to fill this gap, the
current study investigates lexical learning by a group of low-
intermediate L1 English-L2 Spanish students in one of three
emotional contexts: positive, negative, or neutral. Participants are
then tested on their recognition and recall of the test words and the
results from each emotional context are compared.
2. PREVIOUS STUDIES
2.1 Affect and Learning
Much of the research investigating affect and general learning ability
has focused on feelings such as anxiety, stress, frustration, fluency,
or achievement that arise as a result of students’ internal reactions
to a learning task. In general, research has found that there is no
one-sided answer as to whether optimal learning occurs in positive
or negative affective states. Joëls et al. (2006) suggest that stress
can have both facilitating and impairing influences on learning and
memory, asserting that stress will only facilitate learning and
memory when it is experienced in the context and at the time of the
event that needs to be remembered and when the hormones and
transmitters released in response to stress exert their actions on the
same circuits as those activated by the situation. In short, the stress
must be directly associated with that which is to be learned.
Pekrun (2014) asserts that affective states, whether positive
or negative, can have variable effects on learning. Positive and
negative affective states can have the effect of drawing learners’
attention away from their task performance and toward the emotion
itself, thus reducing overall learning outcomes. Additionally,
negative affective states, such as anxiety and shame can also
reduce interest and intrinsic motivation as well as lower learners’
ability to use flexible thought and action. However, these negative
affective states can also have the opposite effect, inducing
motivation to invest effort in order to avoid failure. Positive affective
states, such as enjoyment or excitement, can facilitate learning
when they are task-related; this is to say, if a learner feels
enjoyment from engaging in the task itself, the task becomes the
object of their emotion and their attention is drawn to it. This can
also increase learners’ interest and motivation, resulting in positive
learning outcomes.
While much research has been conducted concerning affect
as it relates to student feelings that result from the learning task
(Fiedler & Beier, 2014), it is also important to take into consideration
the emotional tone of the material itself and the way it is presented.
The broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 1998, 2001;
Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005) suggests that positive emotions
broaden the scopes of attention, cognition, and action, resulting in
a facilitatory effect on learning outcomes because learners pursue a
wider range of thoughts and actions, such as playing, exploring,
savoring, and integrating their experiences. Conversely, negative
emotions shrink the array of percepts, thoughts, and actions.
2.2 Affect and SLA
In the realm of Second Language Acquisition, motivation has long
been identified as an important factor for successful learning
outcomes (Krashen, 1982; Gardner, 1985; Dörnyei, 1998) and
there is a general consensus that motivation and positive affect are
reliable predictors of high achievement among second language (L2)
students (Gardner, 2007; Dörnyei, 2009; Ellis, 2015). Arnold (2009)
argues that an “affectively positive environment puts the brain in
the optimal state for learning: minimal stress and maximum
engagement with the material to be learned” (p. 146). Conversely,
stress and anxiety have been found to have detrimental effects on
learners’ concentration and their ability to encode linguistic stimuli;
these negative affective states can hinder cognitive operations,
memory processes, and they can interfere with language retrieval
and production (MacIntyre & Gardner, 1994).
In more recent years, researchers have taken an interest in
the relationship between emotions and language. Such research has
served to put forward the notion that language plays a role in
emotions as it supports that conceptual knowledge necessary to
make meaning of sensations from the body and the world in a given
context (Lindquist et al., 2015). Many bilingual speakers report
experiencing stronger emotions when using their first language as
compared to their second language (Pavlenko, 2005) and often
prefer to use their second language to maintain emotional distance,
finding it easier to express anxiety-arousing or taboo topics when
operating in their non-native language (Altarriba & Santiago-Rivera,
1994; Harris, Ayiçiçegi & Gleason, 2003; Dewaele, 2004).
Pavlenko (2008) asserts that in the bilingual mental lexicon
emotion words should be considered to be a separate class,
represented and processed differently from both concrete and
abstract word classes. Moreover, concepts of emotions can vary
across languages, resulting in possible divergence between bilingual
and monolingual speakers’ emotional conceptions. Numerous
studies have found that emotion and emotion-laden words are
better recalled than neutral words in various languages and among
monolingual and bilingual speakers (Rubin & Friendly, 1986;
Anooshian & Hertel, 1994; Altarriba & Bauer, 2004; Talmi &
Moscovitch, 2004; Ayiçiçegi & Harris, 2004; Ayiçiçegi-Dinn &
Caldwell-Harris, 2009).
Similarly, results from Anooshian and Hertel (1994) indicate
that emotion and emotion-laden words are better recalled by
bilingual Spanish-English speakers; however, this result was only
present in their L1, regardless of whether that be Spanish or English.
On the other hand, Ayiçiçegi & Harris (2004) find superior memory
for emotion words in recall and recognition tasks in both the L1 and
L2 of bilingual speakers of Turkish and English; in fact, they identify
that the overall memory effect was stronger in the speakers’ L2,
particularly with stimuli that have a negative connotation. Results
from Ayiçiçegi-Dinn & Caldwell-Harris (2009) indicate that words’
emotional attributes are processed to a similar extent in both first
and second languages; in both languages, taboo words have the
highest rates of recall, followed by words with positive connotations.
There was no recall advantage for negative words over neutral
words in either the L1 or L2. Iacozza et al. (2017) investigate neutral
and negative contexts in first and second language speakers. They
find no difference between L1 and L2 in explicit ratings of
emotionality; however, in nervous system reactionary responses,
measured by pupil size, L2 speakers show less reaction to negative
contexts than their L1 counterparts.
3. MOTIVATION
The goal of this study is to investigate how emotional bias affects
lexical learning in L2 Spanish. The aim is to see if the emotion-
memory effects attested in the literature extend beyond the
semantic content of the words themselves. To that end, this study
employs the use of nonce (i.e., invented) words, which serve two
important functions: (1) the use of nonce words ensures that all
participants have had the exact same exposure to the words that
are to be tested, eliminating the possibility that some students may
have previously learned these words in a different context; and (2)
by using nonce words, it is possible to test the same story and lexical
items across all conditions under study. Potential implicit emotional
biases are avoided as there are no associations with previous
experience to be drawn from the target items and considering that
the semantic content of the test words is null, the researchers are
able to isolate emotional context from the semantic drive of the
lexical items. The current study aims to investigate the following
questions:
1. Does the presence of any emotional bias (whether positive or
negative) facilitate lexical learning over the absence of
emotional bias (emotionally neutral stimulus) in L2 Spanish
speakers?
2. Are positive emotional stimuli better predictors of L2 Spanish
learner success in comparison to negative emotional stimuli?
3. Is the effect of emotional bias of the stimuli the same for
novel word recognition as compared to novel word recall?
With these questions in mind, the researchers have put forward
the following hypotheses for the study:
Hypothesis 1: the presence of an emotional bias of any kind
facilitates lexical acquisition in comparison to a neutral
situation with no emotional tilt.
There is considerable research suggesting that positive affect
is facilitative to second language learning (Gardner, 2007; Arnold,
2009; Dörnyei, 2009; Ellis, 2015). As such, our prediction is that
the positive condition of our study will produce the greatest learning
outcomes.
Hypothesis 2: for stories presented with an emotional tilt,
positive emotional imagery and intonation will facilitate
lexical learning among L2 Spanish learners when compared
to negative affective conditions.
Considering the large body of research that has found that both
positive and negative emotional semantic content facilitates recall
and recognition (Rubin & Friendly, 1986; Anooshian & Hertel, 1994;
Altarriba & Bauer, 2004; Talmi & Moscovitch, 2004; Ayiçiçegi &
Harris, 2004), we predict that if we remove the semantic content of
the lexical items, but maintain the emotional drive, the emotion-
memory effect will remain.
Hypothesis 3: the effect of the emotional bias in the story will
be the same for recognition and recall of the novel words.
Following the results from Ayiçiçegi & Harris (2004) for
emotional content words, where there was a similar emotion-
memory effect found for recall and recognition tasks, we predict to
find similar effects for memory and emotional bias in our recognition
and recall tasks.
4. METHODOLOGY
4.1 Participants
Twenty-seven non-native speakers of Spanish participated in the
study. All participants were enrolled in a second-semester Spanish
class at an American university. This study was conducted at the
end of the semester; students were assessed through an informal
interview with the experimenter and through classroom assessment
by their instructor, and those who had achieved an ACTFL level of
Intermediate Low in all language skills were included as part of the
experimental data. After this selection criterion was applied, 23
participants remained. Participation in the study was voluntary, and
all participants completed a Language Background Questionnaire
referring to their experiences with Spanish and with other languages
before completing the experimental tasks.
4.2 Procedure
The study consists of two separate tasks: a Picture Matching Task
and a Picture Naming Task (Matching and Naming hereafter). Both
tasks relate to a common story, presented below. The story contains
11 nonce words. It was created specifically to be as neutral in
meaning as possible, so that three conditions could be created from
it: a Positive condition, a Negative condition, and a Neutral
condition. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the three
conditions (positive condition: n=8; neutral condition: n=7;
negative condition: n=8). Said conditions were implemented
through the use of specific emotionally charged intonation and
through the use of emotion-triggering images (see Appendix). All
conditions were presented to native speakers of Spanish for
confirmation of the perceived emotional bias before conducting the
study. Additionally, each participant was asked to judge the
emotional undertone of the story after both tasks were completed.
Story:
Era un día muy sojable. Los pájaros piaban, y el mundo
parecía estar zorato. Pepe, que vive en un terulo en el
pueblo, se levantó muy garente. No sabía que ese día su
vida iba a cambiar para siempre. Fue a su ventana al lado de
la jufena y al mirar hacia fuera, vio el plinico a lo lejos. Así
que salió y fue a ver a Sara, que trabajaba en la turina.
Juntos decidieron empezar con su plan colfante. Primero,
hicieron el gasicho. Cuando terminaron, se veía muy
mifesco. Y desde entonces, el pueblo nunca será lo mismo.
Será, para siempre, un lugar mucho más rapristo.
Translation:
It was a very sojable day. The birds were chirping and the
world seemed to be zorato. Pepe, who lived in a terulo in
the town, woke up very garente. He didn’t know that day his
life would change forever. He went to the window next to the
jufena and, looking outward, he saw the plinico in the
distance. So he left and went to see Sara, who worked in the
turina. Together they decided to start their colfante plan.
First, they made the gasicho. When they finished, it looked
really mifesco. And since then, the town would never be the
same. It would forever be a much more rapristo place.
As seen in the story, all nonce words were nouns or adjectives
matched for syllable length and phonotactically Spanish. Each
version of the story was pre-recorded in a PowerPoint presentation
and presented auditorily. Each novel word was reinforced with a
visual and textual presentation: it appeared written on the screen
with an associated image. Both cues disappeared after 1 second.
Example 1 below shows three distinct versions of visual
stimuli used for each Condition. In this case, the word Mifesco is
illustrated. For a complete list of the imagery associated with each
nonce word, see Appendix.
(1) Visual stimuli associated with the nonce word mifesco.
Positive
Negative
Neutral
In the Matching task, participants initially saw a slide with all
images from the story on it. One by one, the nonce words would
appear on the screen for a second, and participants would point to
the image associated with each word.
The Naming task started with all images on the screen as
well. In this case, participants would be asked to use the nonce
words they remembered to name as many of the images as they
could. The experiment was organized as follows:
1. Participants watched the presentation/listened to the story
twice.
2. Participants completed the Matching task.
3. Participants watched the presentation/listened to the story
without graphic presentation of the words once.
4. Participants completed the Naming task.
5. Participants were asked to provide their perception of the
story as positive, negative or neutral.
Participants provided strictly oral responses to each task.
Responses to each task were recorded by the experimenter for
further coding and analysis.
4.2.1. Rating Study
A rating study was conducted using an emotion wheel based on
Feldman Barret & Russell (1998) to ensure the reliability of the
stimuli as positive, neutral, or negative. Participants saw the images
used as experimental stimuli and chose a minimum of one and a
maximum of three adjectives used in the emotion wheel to describe
each image. The emotions displayed in the wheel varied in valence
(horizontal axis) and arousal (vertical axis), as seen in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Emotion wheel
9 native speakers of Spanish participated in this study. The
data were coded and analyzed based on whether participants’
reaction to each image matched the experimenters’ intended
emotion in valence, arousal, or both. Results from this rating show
participants are highly perceptive of the intended emotions shown
by the images, as 95% of participant responses matched either the
intended valence or arousal of the images. When breaking down
both categories, participants seem more sensitive to arousal
distinctions (74.25% match between the intended and perceived
arousal) than to valence distinctions (68.6% match), but both sets
of results are well above chance, as the difference between
matching and non-matching responses is highly significant for both
valence and arousal data (two-sample t-tests p < 0.0001). Figure 2
below summarizes the results obtained for this task.
Figure 2. Rating Task Results
4.3 Coding
Coding for the Matching Task was described as either Target or Non-
Target based on whether participants associated the correct image
with each of the words that appeared individually on the screen.
Since the Naming Task requires oral production, there is more
variability in participants’ responses. Table 1 shows an example of
the existing coding categories for this part of the study.
Target
Partial Target
Off-Target
Mifesco
Modesco
Different item:
Rapristo
Table I. Naming Task coding examples
Target and Partial Target responses are grouped together for
analysis under the label “Target”, and Off-Target and Not Attempted
responses are categorized together as “Non-target”. This decision
was made on the basis of the cognitive demands of the task: the
authors recognize that the exact phonetic realization of each nonce
word may not be perfect, but Partial Target responses show that
participants have retained a general representation of the word (all
Partial Target responses consist of at most two mis-remembered
phonemes in the word).
5. RESULTS
5.1 Matching Task
Overall, participants performed at a high accuracy level in the
Matching Task in all conditions, indicating that the task was
appropriately gauged for their level of Spanish. All nouns are
matched at a rate of 70% or higher in all conditions (specifically,
80% for positive and Neutral presentations and 71% for negative).
However, there seems to be a slight disadvantage to the negative
condition, as seen in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Matching task results
A one-way ANOVA revealed a statistically significant
difference between conditions (F(2,20)=19.684, p< .0001). A
Tukey post hoc test showed that the scores for target responses in
the negative condition were significantly lower than in the Neutral
(p=.001) and positive (p=.001). There was no statistically
significant difference between the Neutral and positive conditions
(p>.05).
5.2 Naming Task
The results of the Naming Task show an advantage for the positive
Condition over the Neutral and Negative conditions. Accuracy in the
positive Condition reaches 86% for this group of speakers, whereas
the Negative and Neutral conditions are both below 75% (at 72%
and 74%, respectively).
Figure 4. Naming task results
There was a statistically significant difference between
conditions as determined by one-way ANOVA (F(2,20) = 32.1718,
p < .001). A Tukey post hoc test revealed that the scores obtained
for the positive condition were statistically significantly higher than
those of the Neutral ( p < .001) and Negative (p < .001) conditions.
There was no statistically significant difference between the Neutral
and Negative conditions (p = .469).
When intra-task comparisons are made, the positive
condition shows an overall advantage over the remaining two. While
participants’ responses are most on target in the positive category,
there is a decline in accuracy in the Neutral one. “Negative”
consistently displays the lowest scores in both tasks, with no
improvement or decline for either exercise.
Figure 5. Matching and Naming task comparison results
6. DISCUSSION
The results of these experiments show a clear advantage of the
positive condition in both tasks. Solely changing the emotional
character of the images and intonation has a significant impact on
L2 learners’ recall and recognition of novel words. These results
suggest that lexical learning and retention are most facilitated when
taught with materials that elicit a positive emotional affect. This
finding aligns with previous studies that claim that high motivation
and positive affect favor second language acquisition (Gardner,
2007; Arnold, 2009; Dörnyei, 2009; Ellis, 2015). Negative
intonation and imagery, on the other hand, have a negative impact
on the response patterns presented by this group of speakers.
Participants overall attained high accuracy rates in the Matching
task; however, even in this task it can be seen that the negative
condition results in a cost to lexical recall. While speakers still show
an above-chance matching capacity, the fact that the scores are
significantly lower suggests that it is not the use of any emotion that
can facilitate lexical learning and retention, but specifically the use
of positive, happiness-evoking tones and images. The data in this
study, thus, broaden our understanding of affect in Second
Language Acquisition, extending assertions that positive affect is
associated with positive language-learning outcomes beyond
feelings to the realm of emotions. Likewise, where previous research
has stated that negative affect such as anxiety and stress have a
negative impact on language learning outcomes (Krashen, 1982;
MacIntyre & Gardner, 1994), this research has found that negative
emotions in pedagogical materials can have a similar effect.
There are clear pedagogical implications for these results in
the creation and implementation of classroom materials, particularly
in methods to introduce new vocabulary in the language class. This
research provides data-driven evidence of the importance of
providing students with a positive environment that transpires not
only from the professor’s attitude, but also from the materials that
they are exposed to, particularly in audiovisual resources where the
emotional affect is provided for the student rather than student-
generated, as it may be in a reading activity.
While accuracy rates for positive and negative conditions
remain relatively constant between the two tasks, the Neutral
condition presents a decline in accuracy from the Matching to the
Naming task. This seems to suggest that while a neutral story is not
detrimental to word association, it does not facilitate lexical
encoding to the same extent as the positive condition. This could
potentially be explained in reference to the Yerkes-Dodson Law
(Yerkes & Dodson 1908, Cohen 2011), which states that over- or
under- arousal reduces behavioral task performance. Therefore, it
is plausible that the stimuli for the Neutral condition are not arousing
enough for this set of participants. However, the Yerkes-Dodson Law
falls short in explaining the task comparison: if the stimuli are
under-arousing, this effect should be visible in both tasks. Further
study is necessary at this point to specifically test the Yerkes-
Dodson Law and its relationship to lexical learning in emotional
conditions. In future studies it would be prudent to investigate
further the impact of neutral affect on lexical retention rates, as this
is a potential explanation for the results found in the current study.
This result would be in line with the emotion-memory advantage
granted by a word’s semantic content found by Rubin & Friendly,
1986; Anooshian & Hertel, 1994; Altarriba & Bauer, 2004; Talmi &
Moscovitch, 2004; Ayiçiçegi & Harris, 2004; Ayiçiçegi-Dinn &
Caldwell-Harris, 2009, as mentioned in Section 2.
The difference between the matching and naming tasks in the
Neutral version of the story seems to suggest the presence of an
interpretation/production asymmetry in the learning of nonce words
when produced with a lack of emotional affect. Said asymmetry,
studied by authors such as Conroy and Lidz (2007) or Pickering and
Garrod (2013), has been explored in the field of L1 and L2
acquisition with somewhat conflicting results (although a general
consensus seems to indicate that production tends to be more
conservative than interpretation). However, to the authors’
knowledge, this asymmetry has never been studied with regards to
how emotions link to language acquisition. Although this was
beyond the scope of the current article, future research should
address how these two aspects of L2 acquisition (the
comprehension/production asymmetry and emotions) interact.
7. CONCLUSIONS
The overall finding that new content presented with a positive
emotional drive is recognized and recalled better than content
presented in a neutral or negative emotional context contributes to
work on affect in SLA, extending our understanding of how positive
and negative affect effect language learning. The results from the
current study suggest the importance the role of affect may play in
the classroom beyond motivation and anxiety. As such, the authors
propose that the next steps in this research should be dedicated to
emotional affect in language instruction and classroom material
design. Additionally, this study would benefit from an investigation
of upper intermediate and advanced L2 learners as well as delayed
post-test tasks to determine if the facilitation of emotionally positive
contexts persists beyond the initial task. Finally, this research
should aim to continue to expand the investigation of affect and SLA.
Looking at a wider variety of positive and negative emotions, such
as active emotional states (e.g., excitement and anger) and passive
emotional states (e.g., depression and contentment) would allow for
a more nuanced understanding of how emotional presentation
affects learning. This could be accomplished by developing
methodologies that focus on learners’ emotional interpretation of a
story in conjunction with learning task objectives.
In considering the classroom, the results presented in this
study are not meant to suggest that language instructors should
avoid serious topics such as natural disasters or current events that
may be negative. Rather, instructors should strive to create an
overall positive classroom atmosphere that, as the broaden-and-
build theory (Fredrickson, 1998, 2001) suggests, allows students to
broaden their thought-action repertoires to engage meaningfully
with the course material. In discussing more serious topics that may
stir negative affect, it may be beneficial to conclude the discussion
with an optimistic spin by investigating potential solutions or
discussing organizations that work to combat the problem. Iacozza
et al. (2017) suggest that learning a foreign language in a formal
academic environment does not provide the context for L2 speakers
to establish strong bonds between their L2 and emotional content.
The results reported in this study suggest that teaching language
with an emotional tilt may facilitate lexical learning. Taking these
results together, it seems clear that developing course materials
that take emotional context into account is advantageous for the
development of competent L2 speakers.
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Appendix. Image stimulus by word for each experimental
condition.
Positive
condition
Negative
condition
Neutral
condition
Sojable
Zorato
Terulo
Garente
Jufena
Plinico
Turina
Colfante
Gasicho
Mifesco
Rapristo