Reciprocal Role of Semantic Meaning in Affective Processing in L2: Evidence from Uyghur-Mandarin Bilinguals

The present study aimed to investigate whether bilinguals' affective processing in a second language (L2) was enhanced by semantic meaning and whether different levels of early L2 exposure influenced affective processing in L2. Mandarin native speakers and two groups of Uyghur-Mandarin bilinguals with different levels of L2 exposure at an early age were selected as participants and a priming evaluative decision task was conducted. We orthogonally manipulated the affective and semantic relations between primes and targets in a within-item manner to examine the reciprocal role of semantic meaning in L2 affective processing. For the Mandarin native speaker group, evaluative decisions for the target could be facilitated by semantically related and affective congruent stimuli independently. However, for the Uyghur-Mandarin bilingual groups, we found the significant interactive effects between semantic relatedness and affective congruency that the affective congruency effect could be moderated by semantic relatedness. Moreover, we found that the experience of early exposure to a second language played a role in L2 affective processing. Taken together, these findings demonstrated that L2 affective representations are different from native language (L1), in which L2 affective processing entails semantic meaning access compared with L1.