Abstract:

Promoting mobility and intercultural understanding, the European Union (EU) considers foreign language learning as an important priority. Thus, multilingualism is considered an important element of Europe’s competitiveness. Except for facilitating inter-cultural communication, this trend also positively affects cognitive abilities, such as problem solving, attention and memory as well as flexibility of cognitive process [1,2]. The aim of this study is to investigate how emotional regulation and memory processes in multilingual learners are mutually linked. A special attention was devoted to cognitive aspects during language processing, such as short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) in vocabulary retention. Fifty-two first-year medical students (21 male and 31 female) were subjects in a linguistic experiment using a galvanic skin response (GSR) device. All the participants were given instructions to memorize 10 Slovak and 10 English words, which they had to recall and reproduce after a short break lasting 8 seconds. To test LTM, the experiment was repeated after one week. Emotional states of the participants were monitored and recorded on the GSR device before, during and after the word recall tasks. Two sample t-tests with equal and unequal variance were used to analyze the study results. Although, there was no statistically significant difference between the beginning and the end of the measurement on the GSR device (p>0.05), students showed higher level of emotions when reproducing words in the first language (p<0.05), whether in English (L2) or Slovak (L1). There was statistically significant difference between recalled words in L2 and L1 (p=0.03), as they remembered more words in L1 (335 words) than in L2 (302 words). Overall percentage of word recall success in both languages was 61.25% in the case of STM and 26.35% in LTM, while there was a statistically significant difference between them (p<0.05). Present study partially correlates with findings from the scientific literature, but further studies with different samples are needed. In order to better understand emotional-cognitive processes, it is necessary to further investigate brain activity in multilingual learners [3]. Our study correlates with the policy on plurilingualism and linguistic diversity in the countries of the European Union's (EU).

References:
[1] Bialystok, Ellen, and Fergus I M Craik. “How does bilingualism modify cognitive function? Attention to the mechanism.” Psychonomic bulletin & review vol. 29,4 (2022): 1246-1269. doi:10.3758/s13423-022-02057-5
[2] Tao, Yachen et al. “The influence of bilingual experience on executive function under emotional interference: Evidence from the N1 component.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 14 1107994. 31 Mar. 2023, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1107994
[3] Fragkaki, M., et al. “Higher Education Teaching Transformation with Educational Neuroscience Practices.” ICERI2022 Proceedings, (2022): 579-584. doi: 10.21125/iceri.2022.0194

Keywords:

Multilingual learners, vocabulary retention, galvanic skin response, emotion, cognitive processes, English for medical purposes.