The impact of relevant environmental sounds on foreign language word learning Bellegarda, Melodie García Gámez, Ana Belén Macizo Soria, Pedro Bilingualism Vocabulary learning Adult foreign language acquisition Past research suggests that novel word learning is facilitated by multimodal contexts, which enrich semantic representations and strengthen memory traces. We explored whether environmental sounds (e.g., a creaking door) facilitate foreign language (FL) word learning. In all, 36 Spanish-speaking natives learned 60 written Spanish–FL word pairs, each accompanied by one of three sound conditions: a congruent sound matching the word pairs’ denotation, a meaningless tone or silence. Participants then completed a semantic priming and lexical decision task where reaction times and accuracy were collected. Performance was similar for congruent sound and tone conditions and, compared to silence, showed lower accuracy in the lexical decision task and a marginal benefit in the semantic task. These findings suggest that environmental sounds can influence learning, with varying effects depending on the task. Results are discussed in terms of current language learning models. 2025-09-17T08:50:06Z 2025-09-17T08:50:06Z 2025-08-19 journal article Bellegarda M, García-Gámez AB, Macizo P. The impact of relevant environmental sounds on foreign language word learning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. Published online 2025:1-11. doi:10.1017/S1366728925100394 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/106375 10.1017/S1366728925100394 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ open access Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacional Cambridge University Press