Processing advantage for emotional words in bilingual speakers

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• Emotional word processing is well-documented in native language (L1) speakers.
• Research on affective processing in second languages (L2) yields mixed results.
• Previous studies debated whether L2 affective processing differs due to late acquisition or other factors like proficiency and language similarity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if highly proficient non-native English speakers exhibit similar emotional word processing effects as native English speakers.
• To determine the influence of L1 background, age of acquisition, and language use context on L2 affective word processing.

Main Methods:

• A lexical decision task was employed using matched negative, positive, and neutral English words.
• Participants included highly proficient English speakers with diverse L1 backgrounds and native English speakers.
• Factors such as L1, age of English acquisition, and frequency/context of English use were considered.

Main Results:

• Highly proficient non-native English speakers demonstrated equivalent facilitation in processing emotionally valenced words compared to native speakers.
• This facilitation was observed irrespective of the participants' native language (L1).
• Age of acquisition, frequency, and context of English use did not significantly alter the emotional word processing effect.

Conclusions:

• Affective features of words are processed similarly in a second language (L2) by highly proficient learners, mirroring native language (L1) processing.
• Late acquisition of a second language does not preclude the development of affective associations with L2 words.
• Proficiency and shared emotional valence appear to be key factors in L2 affective word processing, overriding L1 background and learning context.