Emotional and Non-Emotional Verbal Fluency in Native and Non-Native Speakers

Native speakers frequently outperform non-native speakers on classic semantic verbal fluency tasks that target concrete non-emotional word retrieval. Much less is known about performance differences in retrieval of emotional words, which are abstract and crucial to social-emotional competence. This study compared native and non-native speakers' verbal productivity on emotional and non-emotional verbal fluency tasks.

Forty-seven native and 37 non-native speakers of English participated in the study. Participants completed seven semantic verbal fluency tasks in English including classic semantic (e.g., "animals"), action (e.g., "things people do"), and emotional variants (e.g., "things that make people happy"). Subjective and objective measures of English proficiency, information about language usage, and cognitive measures (working memory) were obtained for each participant.

Verbal productivity for classic semantic, action, and emotional verbal fluency was lower for non-native speakers. Smaller language-specific vocabulary in non-native speakers did not moderate positivity biases in emotional verbal fluency. Subjective and objective language proficiency measures were less predictive of performance on the emotional than the non-emotional verbal fluency tasks.

Non-native speakers perform more poorly than native speakers on semantic verbal fluency in English for both emotional and non-emotional variants. Positivity biases are not moderated by language proficiency and are reliable features of emotional verbal fluency. Proficiency measures may be less effective in predicting generation of emotional than neutral words.