Abstract:
The purpose of the current work was to investigate whether word type 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 word types 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. none motion words produced faster color naming times, longer recognition times, and higher error rates in recognition.
