Processing Advantage for Emotional Words in Bilingual Speakers (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
Investigations of the so-called ‘foreign language effect’ have shown that emotional experience is language-dependent in bilingual individuals. Response to negative experiences, in particular, appears attenuated in the second language (L2). However, the human brain is not only reactive, but it also builds on past experiences to anticipate future events. Here, we investigated affective anticipation in immersed Polish–English bilinguals using a priming paradigm in which a verbal cue of controlled affective valence allowed making predictions about a subsequent picture target. As expected, native word cues with a negative valence increased the amplitude of the stimulus preceding negativity, an electrophysiological marker of affective anticipation, as compared with neutral ones. This effect was observed in Polish–English bilinguals and English monolinguals alike. The contrast was non-significant when Polish participants were tested in English, suggesting a possible reduction in affective ...
Mood and gender effects in emotional word processing in unbalanced bilinguals
2022
Aims and objectives: We aimed to explore the relationship between mood and emotional word processing in the bilingual context, as modulated by participants' gender. Methodology: We presented mood-inducing film clips to 28 female and 28 male unbalanced Polish-English bilinguals to put them in positive and negative moods. Participants were asked to decide if native language (L1) and non-native language (L2) single words were positive, negative, or neutral (an emotive decision task). Data and analysis: We analysed participants' subjective mood ratings pre-and postexperimentally together with speed (a linear mixed-effects model) and accuracy (a generalised mixed-effects model) of their responses to single L1 and L2 words. Findings: The results revealed an interaction between mood and language as dependent on word valence, whereby faster reaction times (RTs) were observed to L1 than L2 neutral words only in a positive mood and to L2 positive words in a positive than negative mood. We also observed a response facilitation in a positive compared to negative mood, yet only in females. Finally, we observed faster and more accurate responses to positive and negative compared to neutral words, irrespective of gender and language of operation. Altogether, the results suggest that mood influences how unbalanced bilinguals respond to emotional words and shed a novel light on the role of participants' gender in emotional word processing. Originality: This study extends monolingual research on emotional word processing to the bilingual context and shows how word valence modulates the way unbalanced bilinguals, being put in positive and negative moods, respond to L1 and L2 words. Our results also offer novel insights into research on mood and language, demonstrating that females can be more susceptible to mood changes than males. Significance: Our results highlight the importance of controlling participants' mood and gender in research on emotional language processing in both monolingual and bilingual contexts.
The bilingual brain turns a blind eye to negative statements in the second language
Neurobilingualism research has failed to reveal significant language differences in the processing of affective content. However, the evidence to date derives mostly from studies in which affective stimuli are presented out of context, which is unnatural and fails to capture the complexity of everyday sentence-based communication. Here we investigated semantic integration of affectively salient stimuli in sentential context in the first- and second-language (L2) of late fluent Polish–English bilinguals living in the UK. The 19 participants indicated whether Polish and English sentences ending with a semantically and affectively congruent or incongruent adjective of controlled affective valence made sense while undergoing behavioral and electrophysiological recordings. We focused on the N400, a wave of event-related potentials known to index semantic integration. We expected N400 amplitude to index increased processing demands in L2 English comprehension and potential language–valence interactions to reveal differences in affective processing between languages. Contrary to our initial expectation, we found increased N400 for sentences in L1 Polish, possibly driven by greater affective salience of sentences in the native language. Critically, language interacted with affective valence, such that N400 amplitudes were reduced for English sentences ending in a negative fashion as compared to all other conditions. We interpreted this as a sign that bilinguals suppress L2 content embedded in naturalistic L2 sentences when it has negative valence, thus extending the findings of previous research on single words in clinical and linguistic research.
Emotion word development in bilingual children living in majority and minority contexts
Applied Linguistics (vol. 43, iss. 5, pp. 845–866), 2022
The lexicon of emotion words is fundamental to interpersonal communication. To examine how emotion word acquisition interacts with societal context, the present study investigated emotion word development in three groups of child Korean users aged 4-13: those who use Korean primarily outside the home as a majority language (MajKCs) or inside the home as a minority language (MinKCs), and those who use Korean both inside and outside the home (KCs). These groups, along with a group of L1 Korean adults, rated the emotional valence of 61 Korean emotion words varying in frequency, valence, and age of acquisition. Results showed KCs, MajKCs, and MinKCs all converging toward adult-like valence ratings by ages 11-13; unlike KCs and MajKCs, however, MinKCs did not show age-graded development and continued to diverge from adults in emotion word knowledge by these later ages. These findings support the view that societal context plays a major role in emotion word development, offering one reason for the intergenerational communication difficulties reported by immigrant families.
On Modality Effects in Bilingual Emotional Language Processing: Evidence from Galvanic Skin Response
2018
Though previous research has shown a decreased sensitivity to emotionally-laden linguistic stimuli presented in the non-native (L2) compared to the native language (L1), studies conducted thus far have not examined how different modalities influence bilingual emotional language processing. The present experiment was therefore aimed at investigating how late proficient Polish (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals process emotionally-laden narratives presented in L1 and L2, in the visual and auditory modality. To this aim, we employed the galvanic skin response (GSR) method and a self-report measure (Polish adaptation of the PANAS questionnaire). The GSR findings showed a reduced galvanic skin response to L2 relative to L1, thus suggesting a decreased reactivity to emotional stimuli in L2. Additionally, we observed a more pronounced skin conductance level to visual than auditory stimuli, yet only in L1, which might be accounted for by a self-reference effect that may have been modulated by both language and modality.
Second Language Research
The present study investigates whether the emotional content of words has the same effect in the different languages of bilinguals by testing the effects of word concreteness, the type of task used, and language status. Highly proficient bilinguals of Catalan and Spanish who learned Catalan and Spanish in early childhood in a bilingual immersion context, and who still live in such a context, performed an affective decision task (Experiment 1) and a lexical decision task (Experiment 2) in both Catalan and Spanish. A different set of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals, who were proficient in English and who learned English after early childhood in an instructional setting, performed a lexical decision task in both Spanish and English (Experiment 3). In both tasks administered throughout the experiments, the experimental stimuli were concrete and abstract words that varied in their emotional connotation (i.e. positive, negative and neutral words) and were presented in the two languages involve...
Hemispheric asymmetry of emotion words in a nonnative mind: A divided visual field study
This study investigates hemispheric specialization for emotional words among proficient non-native speakers of English by means of the divided visual field paradigm. The motivation behind the study is to extend the monolingual hemifield research to the nonnative context and see how emotion words are processed in a non-native mind. Sixty eight females participated in the study, all highly proficient in English. The stimuli comprised 12 positive nouns, 12 negative nouns, 12 non-emotional nouns and 36 pseudo-words. To examine the lateralization of emotion, stimuli were presented unilaterally in a random fashion for 180 ms in a go/no-go lexical decision task. The perceptual data showed a right hemispheric advantage for processing speed of negative words and a complementary role of the two hemispheres in the recognition accuracy of experimental stimuli. The data indicate that processing of emotion words in non-native language may require greater interhemispheric communication, but at the same time demonstrates a specific role of the right hemisphere in the processing of negative relative to positive valence. The results of the study are discussed in light of the methodological inconsistencies in the hemifield research as well as the non-native context in which the study was conducted.
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