The acquisition of concrete, abstract, and emotion words in a second language

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.