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THE INFLUENCE OF EMOTIONAL AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE CONTEXT IN CONTENT LEARNING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2020

Candice Frances Open the ORCID record for Candice Frances [Opens in a new window] ,
Angela De Bruin  and
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia
Candice Frances*
Affiliation:
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
Angela De Bruin
Affiliation:
University of York and the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia
Affiliation:
Centro de Ciencia Cognitiva – C3, Universidad Nebrija and the Arctic University of Norway
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Candice Frances, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi 69, 2nd floor, 20009 Donostia – Spain. E-mail: c.frances@bcbl.eu
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Abstract

Prior research has found reduced emotionality with foreign language use, especially with single words, but what happens if emotionality is conveyed throughout a longer text? Does emotionality affect how well we remember and associate information, that is, content learning? We played participants descriptions of two invented countries and tested how well they remembered facts about these countries. Each participant listened to one positive and one neutral description, which was read either in their native language (Spanish) or in their foreign language (English). Participants remembered facts they heard in positive semantic contexts better than those learned in neutral semantic contexts and did better in their native than their foreign language. Importantly, there was no interaction between language and emotionality, suggesting that the previously reported decrease in emotionality in a foreign language might not extend to all areas of foreign language use.

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Type
Research Report
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , September 2020 , pp. 891 - 903
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© Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

This research has been partially funded by grants PGC2018-097145-B-I00, PSI2015-65689-P, the Basque Government through the BERC 2018-2021 program, SEV-2015-0490 from the Spanish Government, and AThEME-613465 from the European Union. CF is supported by a MINECO predoctoral grant from the Spanish government (BES-2016-077169). AdB is supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship from the European Research Council (grant agreement number 743691). JAD is supported by the Spanish Government grant RED2018-102615-T. Thank you to Eneko Anton for his help in stimulus creation.

The experiment in this article earned an Open Data and an Open Materials badge for transparent practices. The data and materials are available at https://osf.io/vecd3/.

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