Making sense of a new word:Emotional modulation on learning Korean

Adopting the typical word-by-word associative learning paradigm, the present study investigated emotional influence on new word learning. In the study phase, the meaning of a Korean word was explained by either a negative Chinese word or a neutral word. In the test phase, the Korean words paired with a negative Chinese word were recognized better than those paired with a neutral word. However, in a living/non-living semantic judgment task, performance in conceptual retrieval of the negatively paired Korean words was lower compared with the neutrally paired ones. The results suggest that, negative information facilitates information extraction of whole words, but interferes with elaborative processing and organization of semantic information of new words.