Effect of Visual Stimulus on Communicative Efficiency in Medical Education

The academic communication of the question – response type in multilingual environment requires a proper linguistic approach that considers cognitive specifics, pragmatics, and cultural codes. The research featured communication strategies that optimize the interaction between university professors and medical students in a multilingual academic environment. The study involved recorded in-class dialogues (1,440 min) between an anatomy professor and multilingual students. The methods of logical classification, linguacognitive modeling, and comparative analysis provided evidence that the response largely depended on the type of stimulus. Visual support served as an auxiliary material or an independent stimulus for the response, which, when combined with a corresponding auditory stimulus, generated more effective reactions. The analysis of factors leading to communicative failures in multilinguals depended on the question (stimulus) and its link to the previous reaction. In this case, visual support was a fundamental stimulus or part of a stimulus for the response. Multilingual students perceived information much faster and more efficiently when asked direct questions with visual stimulus (≥50% correct answers). Stimulus material had a significant impact on the learning process. Therefore, multilingual students need adapted teaching methods in medical and pedagogical discourse.