Did you see that? False memories for emotional words in bilingual children

Martina Cangelosi,Paola Palladino,Francesco Bossi

doi:10.1017/s136672892100105x

Martina Cangelosi, Paola Palladino + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1017/s136672892100105x

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Abstract

AbstractWhen participants process a list of semantically strongly related words, the ones that were not presented may later be said, falsely, to have been on the list. This ‘false memory effect’ has been investigated by means of the DRM paradigm. We applied an emotional version of it to assess the false memory effect for emotional words in bilingual children with a minority language as L1 (their mother tongue) and a monolingual control group. We found that the higher emotionality of the words enhances memory distortion for both the bilingual and the monolingual children, in spite of the disadvantage related to vocabulary skills and of the socioeconomic status that acts on semantic processing independently from the condition of bilingualism. We conclude that bilingual children develop their semantic knowledge separately from their vocabulary skills and parallel to their monolingual peers, with a comparable role played by Arousal and Valence.

Highlights

Mariana is ten years old and she attends the sixth grade in Genoa
During the course of the present study we will examine how the emotional word processing develops in the second language of proficient bilingual children and how it acts on their semantic elaboration: does the emotionality of the lexicon play the same role in one’s second language, making semantic based processing a priority, as it does in one’s first language?
All of the experiments that intended to study the role of emotional word processing in bilinguals focused on correct memorization and not on memory distortions. In light of these gaps we found in literature, we would like to investigate whether the connotation of a word in a bilingual second language acts on semantic and mnestic processing to how it would for monolingual peers in their native languages

Summary

Introduction

Mariana is ten years old and she attends the sixth grade in Genoa. Her family moved to Italy, to Mariana’s father’s hometown when she was just three years old, leaving Santiago del Chile, Mariana’s mother’s birthplace. The words doctor, sterile gown, cot, syringe have a priority meaning for Mariana in light of her fear. During the course of the present study we will examine how the emotional word processing develops in the second language of proficient bilingual children and how it acts on their semantic elaboration: does the emotionality of the lexicon play the same role in one’s second language, making semantic based processing a priority, as it does in one’s first language?

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