Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects on English vocabulary learning by late Chinese-English bilingual using the picture-association method while performing physical activity. Participants were 40 undergraduate students (18-24 years old) enrolled at Dali University in the 2013 academic year. Both the English proficiency level and the fitness level were determined in order to obtain two comparable groups of participants, the experimental group being requested to perform a physical activity during learning while the control group was in a stationary condition during learning. There were 8 sessions of L2 lexical learning and testing in total, once per week. In addition, there was a delayed test on both experimental tasks one month after the 8th session, without intervening learning trials. Response times (RTs) and accuracy rates were recorded for each task. A two-way repeated measure ANOVA and a t-test were performed for data analysis. The results showed that the Chinese-English bilingual learner using picture for L2 learning with physical activity performed better not only in the experienced not only in the Word-Picture Verification Task, that tapped the lexical level, but also in the Grammaticality Judgment Task, that tapped the untrained sentence level. This indicates that the physical activity promoted generalization even to the untrained task. The better performance regarded both the Rts and the accuracy, and emerged from the first session in the Word-Picture Verification Task but only from the fourth session in the Grammaticality Judgment Task. This indicates that the effects of the physical activity are modulated by the mode of training and/or complexity of the task. Finally, the better performance of the experimental group emerged also in the delayed condition. This indicates that the effects of the physical activity on vocabulary learning are long-lasting. The patter of results obtained are accounted for by a model that predicts a better L2 vocabulary memory consolidation under physical activity as a consequence of increase cerebral blood flow and/or a more pronounced action of neurotransmitter involved in verbal learning.