The Impact of Emotional Text and Sleep Consolidation on Incidental Vocabulary Learning in a Second Language

This study examined the effects of emotional valence (positive, negative, neutral) of English texts and sleep consolidation on the incidental acquisition of second language (L2) vocabulary in Chinese–English bilinguals. Each participant was exposed to three English texts with different emotional valences, each containing three English pseudowords. These pseudowords were also embedded into low‐constraint sentences used for the posttest. Eye‐tracking technology was utilized to monitor participants’ reading patterns during text comprehension and posttest sentence reading. Two experiments were conducted. The interval between the two posttests was 24 hours in Experiment 1 and 12 hours in Experiment 2 (with a wake control group). The results revealed that emotional texts and sleep condition facilitated lexical consolidation, with sleep delaying early lexical access but reducing cognitive demands involved in late‐stage integration. These findings suggested that reading emotional texts and adequate sleep were conducive to incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition.