The Effect Of Sentence Context In English Vocabulary Learning: An Event-Related Potential Investigation

Vocabulary is indispensable in language learning, and learning word with the helpof context is one of the most widely-used vocabulary learning strategies. Context canhelp understanding and enhance memory. However, previous researches about contexteffect in vocabulary learning and meaning retrieval are mainly based on behavioralexperiments from which we cannot know how the brain works in the process. There aresome neuropsychological experiments about context’s positive effect in meaningunderstanding, they all happen during the learning but are not during tests ofpost-learning effects. With the development of cognitive neurolinguistics, nowadays,more and more researchers apply neuropsychological techniques like event-relatedpotential (ERP) to detect the on-going process of vocabulary learning and the memoryeffect in the brains. It would be meaningful to check whether ERP experiment wouldstill confirm the context’s advantages from the perspective of neurolinguistics.This research aims at testing the word learning effect of sentence context via anERP experiment. In the experiment,26participants are first required to learn32rarewords, each word for one minute.16words are embedded in strong context sentenceswhile the other half are in weak context sentences. About one hour after the learningsession begins the test session. The participants are now required to press the keyboardbuttons to make a judge on the semantic relationship between the learned English wordsand the pairing Chinese words, which are semantically related or unrelated. During thetest session, the response time, accuracy and electroencephalogram (EEG) are recorded.The main findings of the present study are as follow.(1) More than half of the learned words can be correctly recalled and judged, evenwhen they are learned in weak contexts. And the participants respond significantlyfaster and more accurately for words learned in strong context than in weak context.(2) N400effect (the related VS unrelated difference, revealing the participants’grasp of the words’ meaning) is significantly larger for strong context than weak context.For words learned in weak context, there is no much difference for different brain areas.However, for strong context condition, the N400effect is largest in parietal areas,central areas (midline and right hemisphere) and occipital area (midline), and smallestin frontal areas (midline and left hemisphere). N400effect for different context types islarger on the right hemisphere. The brain area difference of N400effect found in this experiment is basically in line with previous researches.These data firmly support from the perspective of neurolinguistics that contextinformation can help vocabulary learning and enhance memory and promote automationin meaning retrieval process. And in the semantic information recalling process, theright hemisphere contributes more.