‘A surprise I will never forget’: How do adolescent Spanish-German heritage speakers express the emotion of surprise in both their heritage language and the societal language?

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Aim: The affective valence of surprise depends on both individual and contextual factors. This study examined the role of language and cultural background in the linguistic and affective properties of written narratives of surprise produced by adolescent heritage language (HL) speakers and first language (L1) users. Methodology and Data Analysis: Quantitative and qualitative methods were employed to investigate the overall emotional valence, the themes, and the valence and the emotional arousal of the affective vocabulary used in the narratives of surprise written by 148 adolescents, consisting of 60 bilingual speakers of HL Spanish who had grown up in Germany, 27 L1 Spanish speakers and 61 L1 German speakers. Findings: Most of the narratives of surprise had positive emotional valence. Narratives of surprise in Spanish (both L1 and HL) contained more positive, negative and high-arousal words. The heritage speakers recalled different experiences of surprise depending on the language they used and expressed this emotion following similar linguistic and cultural patterns to those of L1 speakers, but with specific attributes that were related to their bilingual/HL speaker status. Originality: We adopted a holistic approach to examine how adolescent heritage speakers express the emotion of surprise and to gain an in-depth understanding of this non-prototypical emotion that has varying affective properties. The methodological innovation is due to the combination of different paradigms and data analysis techniques, including a content analysis, a thematic analysis, and both a within- and a between-subjects design. Implications: The linguistic and cultural factors influencing the expression of surprise should be considered in language teaching and other fields of human communication. Narratives of surprise can be used as a source of second language learning, and surprising information must be transmitted considering the positive or negative effect it might have on the audience.