Learning Words with Feeling: Contextual Valence Effects on the Acquisition of Novel Vocabulary in EFL Learners

The important role of emotion in language processing and vocabulary learning has long been acknowledged, yet little research has investigated its effects in the realm of SLA, and the available evidence also yields varied and sometimes conflicting conclusions. The present study seeks to address inconsistencies in existing literature by jointly exploring three dimensions of vocabulary knowledge (form, denotative meaning, and emotional meaning), thereby contributing to and extending the current body of research. Adopting a within-subjects experimental design in an incidental learning paradigm, this study built on Dong, Mak, Hepach, & Nation (2024) and involved 74 Vietnamese EFL adult learners who were exposed to 30 novel adjectives through reading 60 short English narratives of different valence conditions (20 positive, 20 negative, and 20 neutral). Learning was assessed immediately and after a one-week delay through four tasks: speeded recognition (form), meaning matching (denotative meaning), sentence completion (emotional meaning, immediate), and valence judgement (emotional meaning, delayed).