Faces of different socio-cultural identities impact emotional meaning learning for L2 words

Abstract

This study investigated how exposure to Caucasian and Chinese faces influences native Mandarin-Chinese speakers' learning of emotional meanings for English L2 words. Participants were presented with English pseudowords repeatedly paired with either Caucasian faces or Chinese faces showing emotions of disgust, sadness, or neutrality as a control baseline. Participants' learning was evaluated through both within-modality (i.e., testing participants with new sets of faces) and cross-modality (i.e., testing participants with sentences expressing the learned emotions) generalization tests. When matching newly learned L2 words with new faces, participants from both groups were more accurate under the neutral condition compared to sad condition. The advantage of neutrality extended to sentences as participants matched newly learned L2 words with neutral sentences more accurately than with both disgusting and sad ones. Differences between the two groups were also found in the cross-modality generalization test in which the Caucasian-face Group outperformed the Chinese-face Group in terms of accuracy in sad trials. However, the Chinese-face Group was more accurate in neutral trials in the same test. We thus conclude that faces of diverse socio-cultural identities exert different impacts on the emotional meaning learning for L2 words.

Keywords: Disgust; Faces; Pseudowords; Sadness; Second language.

Fig. 1

Experimental procedures for both groups.

Fig. 2

Examples of materials in the Chinese-face group.

Fig. 2

Examples of materials in the Chinese-face group.

Fig. 3

Examples of materials in the Foreign-face group.

Fig. 3

Examples of materials in the Foreign-face group.

Fig. 4

The response accuracy in within-modality generalization test of the two groups.

Fig. 5

The response accuracy in cross-modality generalization test of the two groups.