Verbs describe actions and changes in states, and are closely grounded in perceptual and motor experiences. Their core attributes align precisely with the embodied effect, which has increasingly attracted attention in research on verb processing and learning. To further clarify the influencing mechanisms and potential factors (verb concreteness, motor features, verb layer, depth of processing task and language status) of the embodied effect in verb processing and learning, a three-level meta-analysis with a random-effects model was performed on 37 studies (265 effect sizes and 12,357 participants) published in the past 15 years. The results revealed that there was an embodied effect in verb processing and learning, with a significant total effect size (Hedges’ g = 0.259, p < 0.005). Specifically, verb concreteness and verb layer moderated this effect. These findings suggest that future research should further explore the mechanisms and interactive influences of verb features and contextual information on the embodied effect. The findings further imply that language instruction may benefit from integrating embodied experiences with contextualized linguistic input to enhance verb learning and comprehension.

Individual differences in statistical learning (SL) constitute an important cognitive mechanism that supports second language (L2) syntactic processing. However, existing research has primarily focused on adult populations, while potential differences across input modalities remain understudied. This study investigated the associations between SL and implicit L2 morphosyntactic processing among Chinese adolescent English learners, comparing results across visual and auditory modalities. Participants completed visual and auditory SL tasks, self-paced reading (SPR), self-paced listening (SPL), as well as working memory (WM) and attention tasks. L2 morphosyntactic processing ability was measured via grammatical sensitivity indicators extracted from SPR and SPL data. Mixed-effects analyses did not detect statistically reliable group-level grammaticality effects in either task, though SPR exhibited a descriptive pattern where ungrammatical sentences elicited longer reading times at the third word. Participants achieved higher accuracy on the visual SL task than the auditory one. In exploratory regression analyses, visual SL accuracy was found to positively predict grammatical sensitivity measured at Word 3 in SPR. Still, this association was not confirmed in a follow-up sensitivity analysis. No corresponding significant association was observed between auditory SL and SPL sensitivity, and neither working memory nor attention showed consistent independent contributions to the outcome. These findings extend individual-differences research on this topic to adolescent classroom L2 learners and underscore the potentially important role of visual regularity learning in online L2 reading processing.