Seeing Pictures of Home Can Make It Harder To Speak a Foreign Language

The recent article on the Smithsonian web site on new research that demonstrates that being exposed to faces or images that you associate with your home country primes you to think in your native tongue and so interferes with second language acquisition may seem self-evident to many seasoned language learners. However, as the article concludes, this may have some  future impact on the practices surrounding the teaching of second languages, by providing further evidence that immersion is the most effective way for someone to gain mastery because it reduces the counter-priming examined in the cited study. It might also suggest that for those learners who are sensitive to visual stimulus as a mnemonic device, the use of visual images when learning that are strongly linked to the country associated with the second language will do a lot to help reinforce new vocabulary acquisition e.g. for Chinese learners, the Mandarin word for 'wall' superimposed on a photo of the Great Wall of China.