The Influence Of Contextual Emotionality On Abstract And Specific Vocabulary Learning

Word learning is of great significance to human beings.The previous researches on word learning mainly investigate the mechanism of isolated word learning.Those researches not only rarely do any research about how context affects word learning,but also ignored the emotional factor in the context which could impact on word learning.Those malpractices made the researches far more different from the real situation.What’s more,those researches’ result are lacking of ecological validity.Therefore,this study constructs three kinds of contexts which contain different valence of emotion.Subjects were asked to learn new words according to the emotional context.This study uses real-time online word learning paradigm and the EEG technology which has high time resolution,analysis EEG data which have been recorded during test and learning stage.It tries to reveal how the emotional context influences word learning and the influence mechanism in the encoding stage in the process.In addition,previous studies have found there is a significant interactive effect between the emotional context and concreteness of words.Therefore,this study will systematically manipulate the concreteness of learning words,and explore the influence of contextual emotion on the learning of different concreteness words.There were learn and test stages in this study.In the learn stage,the subjects were presented with highly restrictive emotional(positive,negative or neutral)contexts.They were asked to guess the meaning of the word(artificial pseudo-word words).After learn stage,the subjects would access into test stages.In the test stage,the new learned words were judged whether they are consistent with the true words.The correctness and reaction time were recorded.In addition,EEG technology was used to record the EEG responses during the learn and test stages.Test stage of the behavioral data showed as follows.Compared with words which learned in the neutral context,both abstract and concrete words learned in negative context has longer reaction time and lower accuracy rate.Compared with words which learned in the neutral context,abstract words which learned in the positive context are worse than concrete words learned in positive context.The results show that the negative emotion has a certain adverse effects on both abstract and concrete words.And positive context has a negative effect on abstract words learning and promote concrete word learning.The EEG data corresponding to behavioral data showed:context’s emotional and concreteness have a significant interaction.The details of the EEG results are as follows:under the positive context,abstract words evoked a more positive P2 component than concrete words;under neutral context,abstract word induced a more positive LPC than concrete words;under negative context,two kinds of words have no significant differences.Combined with the behavioral results,ERP results showed that the semantic integration of abstract words in early and late attentional processing have disadvantages than concrete words.Those disadvantages have different performance in three different emotional of contexts.Learning stage of EEG data showed as follows:abstract word which learned in positive context evoked a more negative N400 and more positive LPC than concrete words learned in positive context;under negative context,abstract words induced a more significant LPC effect than concrete words;under neutral context,there is no significant difference between the two kinds of words.These results indicate that in the processing of establishing mapping relationship between words and semantic,the positive context is unfavorable for semantic analysis and semantic integration of words,which resulted in abstract word was not well learned as concrete words in testing stage.In addition,to some extent,the negative context had a hinder impact on the processing of semantic integration of abstract words.But it did not lead a gap between abstract words and concrete learning performance.In order to explain the relationship between learning and emotional effect of the encoding phase and vocabulary learning effect more clearly.We did a multiple regression analysis to reveal the relationship between the predicted learning stage EEG responses to the test phase behavior results.We found that in positive context,the difficulty in learning the meaning of the integration of-abstract and concrete words can lead to the diff-erence of the speed of processing of meaning extraction.The conclusions are as follows:(1)Negative context is not conducive to word learning,which can hinder the learning of abstract and concrete words.(2)Abstract words in the early processing of the attentional load and the late semantic integration have a certain disadvantage than the concrete words.The disadvantage has different performance in different emotion context(3)In the process of the establishment of lexical semantic mapping relationship,the emotional context has an impact on the semantic analysis and semantic integration.