Expressions with Aspectual Verbs Elicit Slower Reading Times than Those with Psychological Verbs: An Eye-Tracking Study in Mandarin Chinese.

Research over the last 20 years has investigated the processing costs for sentences such as John began the book. Much of this work has conflated sentences with aspectual verbs, like start or finish, with psychological verbs, like enjoy or tolerate. However, recent studies have reported greater costs for aspectual verbs compared to psychological verbs (e.g., Katsika et al. in Ment Lex 7:58-76, 2012; Lai et al. in Compositionality and concepts in linguistics and psychology, 2017). The present paper reports an eye-tracking study that examined the costs of processing both verb types in Mandarin Chinese. The results revealed greater costs both for aspectual verbs compared to controls (John read the book) and for aspectual verbs compared to psychological verbs, reinforcing the claims of the Structured Individual Hypothesis (Piñango and Deo in J Semant 33:359-408, 2016). Strikingly, there was an early effect at the verb for aspectual verbs but not for psychological verbs. We argue that this result, together with previous findings and other conceptual issues, necessitates a conservative modification of the SIH: aspectual verbs are semantically more complex than psychological verbs. This modification retains the core analysis underlying the SIH, but reconciles the SIH with experimental findings by bringing it in line with the view that lexical semantic complexity has immediate consequences in processing (e.g., Brennan and Pylkkänen in Lang Cogn Process 25:777-807, 2010).

Playing with fire: effects of negative mood induction and working memory on vocabulary acquisition.

We investigated the impact of emotions on learning vocabulary in an unfamiliar language to better understand affective influences in foreign language acquisition. Seventy native English speakers learned new vocabulary in either a negative or a neutral emotional state. Participants also completed two sets of working memory tasks to examine the potential mediating role of working memory. Results revealed that participants exposed to negative stimuli exhibited difficulty in retrieving and correctly pairing English words with Indonesian words, as reflected in a lower performance on the prompted recall tests and the free recall measure. Emotional induction did not change working memory scores from pre to post manipulation. This suggests working memory could not explain the reduced vocabulary learning in the negative group. We argue that negative mood can adversely affect language learning by suppressing aspects of native-language processing and impeding form-meaning mapping with second language words.