title: The role of emotionality in the acquisition of new concrete and abstract words.
abstract: A processing advantage for emotional words relative to neutral words has been widely demonstrated in the monolingual domain (e.g., Kuperman et al., 2014). It is also well-known that, in bilingual speakers who have a certain degree of proficiency in their second language, the effects of the affective content of words on cognition are not restricted to the native language (e.g., Ferré et al., 2010). The aim of the present study was to test whether this facilitatory effect can also be obtained during the very early stages of word acquisition. In the context of a novel word learning paradigm, participants were trained on a set of Basque words by associating them to their Spanish translations. Words' concreteness and affective valence were orthogonally manipulated. Immediately after the learning phase and 1 week later, participants were tested in a Basque go-no go lexical decision task as well as in a translation task in which they had to provide the Spanish translation of the Basque words. A similar pattern of results was found across tasks and sessions, revealing main effects of concreteness and emotional content as well as an interaction between both factors. Thus, the emotional content facilitated the acquisition of abstract, but not concrete words, in the new language, with a more reliable effect for negative words than for positive ones. The results are discussed in light of the embodied theoretical view of semantic representation proposed by Kousta et al. (2011).
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Behavior Assessment and Department of Psychology, Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona Spain.
authors.forename: Pilar
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ferré
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Behavior Assessment and Department of Psychology, Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona Spain.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ventura
authors.affiliation: Human Cognition Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga Portugal.
authors.forename: Montserrat
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Comesaña
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Processes & Behavior Research Group, Department of Social Psychology, Basic Psychology and Methodology, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela Spain.
authors.forename: Isabel
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Fraga
keywords: concreteness; emotional words; lexical decision; novel vocabulary learning; translation task