Processing of emotional words in bilinguals: Testing the effects of word concreteness, task type and language status

Abstract

The present study investigates whether the emotional content of words has the same effect in the different languages of bilinguals by testing the effects of word concreteness, the type of task used, and language status. Highly proficient bilinguals of Catalan and Spanish who learned Catalan and Spanish in early childhood in a bilingual immersion context, and who still live in such a context, performed an affective decision task (Experiment 1) and a lexical decision task (Experiment 2) in both Catalan and Spanish. A different set of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals, who were proficient in English and who learned English after early childhood in an instructional setting, performed a lexical decision task in both Spanish and English (Experiment 3). In both tasks administered throughout the experiments, the experimental stimuli were concrete and abstract words that varied in their emotional connotation (i.e. positive, negative and neutral words) and were presented in the two languages involved. In the affective decision task, participants decided if the words had emotional content or not, and in the lexical decision task they decided if the strings of letters were real words or not. The three experiments also included an unexpected free recall task. Results showed that the emotional content of words affected bilinguals’ performance in all three tasks. In particular, there was a disadvantage in processing for negative words in both the affective and lexical decision tasks, and an advantage for positive words in the lexical decision and free recall tasks. Importantly, language only interacted with the other variables in Experiment 3, suggesting that language status is a relevant factor in determining the extent to which emotional processing has the same characteristics in the two languages.