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Abstract
The purpose of the current work was to investigate whether wordtype moderates the learning of vocabulary words in a new language. English-speaking monolinguals were trained on a matched set of concrete (e.g., jewel), emotion (e.g., angry), and abstract (e.g., virtue) words in Spanish. Participants learned a set of Spanish words and then engaged in a Stroop color-word task where they determined the color in which the words appeared (none were related to color). They also engaged in a translation recognition task where foils included semantic associates of the newly acquired word. Results indicated that although the semantic representations of all three wordtypes were acquired, there was a gradient in the degree to which those meanings were automatically activated. The pattern of data indicated that newly learned emotion words vs. non-emotion words produced faster color naming times, longer recognition times, and higher error rates in recognition.
Keywords
abstract words, concrete words, emotion words, second language acquisition
1 Introduction
One of the goals of the current investigation was to uncover the ways in which various wordtypes (concrete, abstract, and emotion) may be acquired, and to discover whether or not there is a gradient in learning these words. That is, is it possible that certain wordtypes acquired in a new language are learned more easily than others? If this is indeed the case, then methods of learning a new language can be directed towards enhancing the memory representation for those wordtypes that are not learned as easily as others.
In first language (L1) acquisition, concrete words (e.g., table, paper) are typically learned prior to abstract words (e.g., liberty, myth) (Schwanenflugel, Akin, & Luh, 1992). Concrete words have also been shown to be processed faster and remembered better than abstract words. Paivio and colleagues have argued that this benefit for concrete words stems from the fact that they are coded in terms of both a verbal label and an image - Dual Coding Theory (Paivio, 1986). Schwanenflugel et al. (1992) noted that the advantages demonstrated by concrete words may also stem from the fact that concrete words have greater 'context-availability' than abstract words. It is typically easier to think of a context in which concrete words appear than it is to think of a context in which...