Contextual Emotions And Vocabulary Specificity Regulate The Plasticity Of Vocabulary Learning Brain Areas

Numerous studies have investigated the neuro-cognitive mechanism of learning words in isolation or in semantic contexts recently.However,emotion as an important influencing factor on novel word learning has not been fully considered in the previous studies and how emotions affect word learning and the underlying neural mechanism have not been systematically investigated.The present study was divided into two stages:learning and testing.The learning stage:16 participants used three different emotional contexts to learn target new words corresponding to different types of real words for three days.The testing stage:participants needed to judge whether the target new word were consistent with the real words.We compared the brain activations in dayl and day3 aming to investigate the role of contextual emotions in learning different types of words and the corresponding neural plasticity in the neural mechanism level.The conclusions are as follows:(1)Behaviorally,the performance for the words learned in the negative context was lower than the neutral and positive context,which indicated that contextual emotions had significant impact on novel word learning.(2)Vocabulary learning caused functional plasticity in several brain regions including the right angular(AG),bilateral insula,anterior cingulate gyrus(ACC),the left inferior frontal gyrus(IFG)and left fusiform(FG).These brain regions showed more significant functional plasticity changes modulated by the negative context.(3)And the insula also was sensitive to the concreteness of the learned words.(4)More importantly,the functional plasticity of left inferior frontal gyrus(L IFG)and left fusiform(L FG)were interactively influenced by the contextual emotions and words' concreteness,suggesting that the contextual emotional information had a discriminable effect on different types of words in the neural mechanism level.These results demonstrate that the emotional information in contexts is inevitable for word learning,and the role of contextual emotions in brain plasticity for learning was discussed.