Abstract
To investigate whether second language processing is characterized by the same sensitivity to the emotional content of language – as compared to native language processing – we conducted an EEG study manipulating word emotional valence in a visual lexical decision task. Two groups of late bilinguals – native speakers of German and Spanish with sufficient proficiency in their respective second language – performed each a German and a Spanish version of the task containing identical semantic material: translations of words in the two languages. In contrast to theoretical proposals assuming attenuated emotionality of second language processing, a highly similar pattern of results was obtained across L1 and L2 processing: event related potential waves generally reflected an early posterior negativity plus a late positive complex for words with positive or negative valence compared to neutral words regardless of the respective test language and its L1 or L2 status. These results suggest that the coupling between cognition and emotion does not qualitatively differ between L1 and L2 although latencies of respective effects differed about 50–100 ms. Only Spanish native speakers currently living in the L2 country showed no effects for negative as compared to neutral words presented in L2 – potentially reflecting a predominant positivity bias in second language processing when currently being exposed to a new culture.
Highlights
Emotions are a basic element of human communication which is mostly operated through language
The differential pattern of lexicality effects – being relatively weak especially in the German natives’ L1 data as compared to the Spanish natives’ L1 data –supports the assumption that potential RT differences between different German word conditions have been reduced due to the application of a more liberal response criterion all German words would benefit from. This does not imply that no lexical access or semantic processing would have occurred for German words, rather it means that lexical access or word identification would no longer have been alone responsible for triggering correct responses to German words
To further explore our data, and to provide a comprehensive overview allowing for direct comparisons of effect sizes across participant groups and L1 vs. L2 performance we conducted additional ANOVAs collapsing time windows where significant early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive complex (LPC) effects had appeared in the explorative analyses for each 26 Spanish and German participants presented above
Summary
Emotions are a basic element of human communication which is mostly operated through language. The role of emotion for language perception is being investigated in a range of psycholinguistic domains and methodologies: While it may appear intuitively evident that larger units of text or speech describing emotional events (e.g., Altmann et al, submitted; Bohrn et al, submitted), or the emotional prosody of speech (e.g., Kotz and Paulmann, 2007; Pell et al, 2009) would trigger emotional processing in the reader or listener, for the processing of more fine grained units of language, emotion effects have been observed This holds true for – superficially – purely cognitive tasks, and even when just single words are visually presented: Emotion-laden words are recalled better than neutral words [Rubin and Friendly, 1986; see Dietrich et al, 2001, for an event related potential (ERP) study] and they seem to possess a processing advantage in terms of speed of lexical access, e.g., when the task consists of deciding whether a given letter string is a word or not in lexical decision (Eviatar and Zaidel, 1991; Kuchinke et al, 2005; Kousta et al, 2009; Schacht and Sommer, 2009a, among others).
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