Cognitive Foundations of Immersive MALL: How Extended Reality Shapes Language Processing in Mobile Contexts

This study examines how extended reality (XR), which includes both virtual and augmented reality, alters adult English language learners’ real-time language processing in an ESL setting. We investigate whether immersive and spatially anchored XR environments can promote deeper lexical retrieval and more fluid semantic integration during every day, context-rich language practice, going beyond the flat and screen-bound interactions common in mobile learning apps. In a rigorous academic English program located in an Englishdominant urban setting, we carried out a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest study. In one group, two complete classes (N = 68) used mobile-tethered XR to interact with vocabulary and sentence comprehension materials, while the other group used standard smartphone interfaces. Notably, every participant lived and studied in a real-world ESL environment where learning English is a daily necessity rather than merely a subject in the classroom. We recorded response latencies and eye movements during comprehension exercises. ANCOVA and linear mixed-effects models that controlled for working memory capacity, first-language background, and baseline proficiency were used to analyze the data. The findings demonstrated that learners who used XR-MALL (mobile-assisted language learning) processed target input much more quickly and accurately than those in the control group: contextual inference accuracy increased by 18% (p = 0.002), and lexical decision times decreased by an average of 92 milliseconds (p < 0.001). Eye-tracking patterns also revealed that speakers of Tamil and Hindi had better visual-linguistic alignment in XR, focusing on semantically relevant objects faster and keeping their eyes on them longer when speaking. This shows that XR is a powerful cognitive framework that aids students in overcoming enduring difficulties with referential grounding, especially those brought on by the linguistic divide between L1 and L2. XR reconfigures meaning, access, and integration by grounding language learning in embodied, spatial contexts, rather than just adding novelty. Our results provide useful advice for developing fair, cognitively responsive MALL tools that appeal to a variety of real-world learners and theoretically shed light on how situated cognition influences language comprehension in immersive settings.