Emotional Design in Chinese Pictographic Character Learning: Effects on Cognitive Load, Aesthetic Pleasure, and Intrinsic Motivation Among CSL Learners

The orthographic simplification of Chinese pictographic characters may place a cognitive strain on contemporary learners. Historical evolution has reduced the visual transparency of Chinese pictographic characters, making them increasingly difficult for learners of Chinese as a second language to recognize intuitively. Although current technologies assist in the acquisition of Chinese pictographic characters, how the design of instructional materials shapes learners’ emotional experience in Chinese pictographic character learning remains underexplored. This work, grounded in Emotional Design, designed four versions of instructional materials for 32 Chinese pictographic characters under the title Revitalize Character. A within-subjects experiment with 32 learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL) was conducted, employing recognition-based learning tasks, to assess the effects of four conditions: no emotional design (ND), anthropomorphizing emotional design (AD), colorful emotional design (CD), and anthropomorphizing & colorful emotional design (ACD) on cognitive load, aesthetic pleasure, and intrinsic motivation. The experimental findings demonstrate that, in contrast to ND, CD significantly diminished extraneous cognitive load (ECL, p<0.01), and both CD and ACD elevated germane cognitive load (GCL, p<0.01) and markedly improved learners’ aesthetic pleasure (p<0.001). Regarding motivation, AD led to a significantly greater decrease in intrinsic motivation compared to CD (p<0.05). Qualitatively, ACD received more favorable responses from learners than the other conditions, while AD resulted in a subpar learning experience. This study offers empirical evidence for the implementation of emotional design in the recognition-based learning of Chinese pictographic characters, illustrating its potential to improve important aspects of the learning experience.