Ferré, P. 1, 2 , Sánchez-Casas, R. 1, 2 & Fraga, I. 3
1 Universitat Rovira i Virgili. Tarragona. Spain
2 CRAMC. Tarragona. Spain
3 Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
Emotionally charged words are better remembered than neutral words. This well established fact in monolinguals has been recently tested in bilinguals. The results of these studies have not been consistent, since several authors have obtained the emotional effect on memory only for L1 words (Anooshian & Hertel, 1994), whereas others have observed this effect for words in the two languages (Ayçiçegi & Harris, 2004; Ayçiçegi-Dinn & Caldwell Harris, 2009; Ferré et al., 2010). In most of the previous studies, the task that participants had to perform with the words at the encoding phase was to rate them on some affective dimension. The aim of the present study was to test whether the emotional effect on memory can be obtained when participants perform other encoding tasks. We conducted two memory experiments with early proficient bilinguals of Spanish and Catalan. At the encoding phase of Experiment 1, participants had to count the number of letters of L1 and L2 words (a physical encoding condition). In Experiment 2, they had to rate the concreteness of each word (a semantic encoding condition). Results showed that the type of encoding task can modulate the emotionality effect obtained in L2.