Wu, Y. 1 & Thierry, G. 1, 2
1 Bangor University
2 ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory & Practice
It has long been suggested that bilingual individuals process emotional words differently in their two languages. On the one hand, there is anecdotal evidence that bilinguals prefer to express emotionally charged content in their second language rather than their native language. On the other hand, in free recall and recognition tasks, emotional words are better recalled in the native than the second language. However, previous studies have mostly relied on participant's subjective experiences (e.g., during interviews) or psychophysiological responses recorded when they actively evaluate emotional words (e.g., rating tasks). It is unknown how emotional words are processed in the second language automatically and when the emotional content of the stimuli is task-irrelevant. Here, we compared the processing of negative, positive, and neutral L2 English words when Chinese-English bilinguals performed an independent semantic relatedness judgment task. In addition to the manipulation of emotional contents, bilingual participants were unaware that some of the English word pairs when translated into Chinese had a Chinese character in common. Behavioural responses recorded during the experiment showed that neither the explicit manipulation of emotionality nor the implicit manipulation of native language repetition affected the behavioural performance of bilinguals. However, event-related brain potentials results showed that whilst Chinese-English bilinguals automatically accessed the Chinese translations of neutral and positive words, they did not access the translation equivalents of negative words presented in English. The classical N400 modulation elicited by character repetition hidden in the Chinese translations was only found for positive and neutral English word pairs. The finding that reading negative words in English fails to activate Chinese translations suggests the existence of a bottom-up mechanism that automatically inhibits deep lexical-semantic processing of negative words encountered in the second language.