Iranian Journal of Learning and Memory

Abstract Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of foreign language anxiety (FLA) on English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students’ cognitive processing of linguistic stimuli.
Methods: The participants were 179 upper-intermediate or advanced EFL learners from different branches of an English language teaching institute. They were asked to fill out the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) questionnaire and then, considering their scores, were randomly assigned to high-anxiety and low-anxiety groups. To analyze the EFL learners’ cognitive processing of linguistic stimuli, a semantic decision task was used in the present study. In this task, participants saw a pair of words presented one after each other and were asked to decide whether the target word was related in meaning to the preceding prime word. Mixed Factorial Repeated Measure ANOVA was run on error rate (ER) data to establish the potential interaction between primes and targets. To reveal any potential anxiety effects, anxiety was run as a between-subject factor in the analysis.
Results: The findings showed a statistically significant effect of anxiety on cognitive processing of linguistic stimuli with respect to ER. More specifically, the EFL students in the low-anxiety group made fewer errors in comparison to their counterparts in the high-anxiety group.
Conclusion: The findings are attributed to the attentional control theory and cognitive overload of working memory, cognitive interference theory, and the specific nature of the task used in the present study. The results emphasize the fact that FLA could result in deficits in cognitive processing of linguistic stimuli by foreign language learners. 

Abstract Due to both experimental and theoretical controversies on semantic relatedness research in second/foreign language (L2) education, the present study provides an alternative approach by investigating English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners’ cognitive processing of semantically related and unrelated words. The participants were 38 Iranian EFL learners from upper intermediate classes at a private language teaching school. Employing a semantic priming experiment, the EFL learners saw a pair of words, and were asked to decide whether or not the target word (i.e. an adjective) was related in meaning to the preceding word (i.e. a noun). A two-way Repeated Measure ANOVA was run on reaction time (RT) and error rate (ER) data. Results of the study showed that semantically related words induced faster RTs than semantically unrelated ones, confirming the positive effect of the semantic relatedness in cognitive processing of L2 words. However, higher ERs in related conditions in comparison to unrelated conditions refer to a kind of confusion on the part of EFL learners.

Abstract The current study presents an alternative approach toward semantic relatedness research in second/foreign language (L2) education as it looks at the issue from a cognitive perspective. The participants were 35 intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. A semantic priming experiment was used to examine the cognitive processing of semantically related and semantically unrelated words. Repeated Measure ANOVA was run on reaction time and error rate data to establish any potential interaction between the primes and targets with reference to their semantic relatedness. The results showed that semantic relatedness does exercise a noteworthy influence on the ease of cognitive processing of L2 words. This facilitative effect is reflected in faster responses and lower errors on the part of the EFL learners when they dealt with semantically related words in comparison to semantically unrelated words, and can be attributed to the core mechanism of activation of lexical items in the human mind.