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Updated: Aug 2, 2025

Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effect of Induced Emotion on Grammar Learning
Published on: January 29, 2020
That means something to me: How linguistic and emotional experience affect the acquisition, representation, and
Linda Espey1, Marta Ghio1, Christian Bellebaum1
1Department of Biological Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-University.
Abstract:
We used a novel linguistic training paradigm to investigate the experience-dependent acquisition, representation, and processing of novel emotional and neutral abstract concepts. Participants engaged in mental imagery (n = 32) or lexico-semantic rephrasing (n = 34) of linguistic material during five training sessions and successfully learned the novel abstract concepts. Feature production after training showed that specifically emotion features enriched the emotional concepts' representations. Unexpectedly, for participants engaging in vivid mental imagery during training a higher semantic richness of the acquired emotional concepts slowed down lexical decisions. Rephrasing, in turn, promoted a better learning and processing performance than imagery, probably due to stronger established lexical associations. Our results confirm the importance of emotional and linguistic experience and additional deep lexico-semantic processing for the acquisition, representation, and processing of abstract concepts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
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