Age of Acquisition Effect in Second Language Emotion Word Recognition: A Cross-Task Validation

Although the effect of the age of acquisition (AoA) has been comprehensively investigated in a multitude of research undertakings, the way emotion word processing in the second language (L2) is regulated by AoA, in combination with other affective components like valence and arousal, remains relatively underexplored. Thus, in this study, the influences of objective AoA, valence, and arousal on English emotion word recognition among Chinese-English bilinguals were probed through two experiments. In Experiment 1, the valence judgment task was adopted to explore the roles and interaction of objective valence and AoA in emotion word recognition. In Experiment 2, the lexical decision task was utilized to scrutinize the effects of objective AoA and arousal, along with their interaction. The objective AoA effect was affirmed across the two experiments, indicating that early-acquired words were processed more rapidly than later-acquired words. The facilitating effect of arousal and positivity was also substantiated. The results offered conclusive evidence of the independent impacts of AoA, valence, and arousal on L2 emotion word recognition and further buttressed the disembodied account and semantic hypothesis for L2 AoA effect.