Rodríguez Cuadrado, S. 1 , Vinson, D. 2 , Costa Martínez, A. 1 & Vigliocco, G. 2
1 Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació y les Comunicacions, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
2 Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Department, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Do late bilinguals process emotional words and sentences in their second language (L2) as monolinguals do? The relation between emotional language and bilingualism has been mainly treated in two ways. The subjective approach, based on interviews and self-questionnaires, seems to indicate that a bilinguals' first language (L1) is more emotional than their L2. The objective approach instead employs experimental tasks to assess consequences of emotional content for automatic language processing. Such studies tend to find similar effects of emotional content, whether comparing a bilinguals' two languages, or monolinguals and bilinguals. However, work of this type has been criticized due to lack of control and effects of emotional variables appear to vary depending on task. In three experiments, we addressed these concerns, employing sets of highly-matched items across three different tasks, to assess processing of emotionally loaded words by English monolingual and late Spanish-English bilingual speakers. Experiment 1 employed lexical decision for negative, positive and neutral words which were controlled for 10 lexical variables. Experiment 2 used the same words in a valence judgement task. Finally, Experiment 3 examined processing words in sentence contexts (sensicality judgement task). We created emotional and neutral sentences from another highly-controlled set of words (also controlling for sentence length, verbal tense and number). In all three experiments we found effects of valence, but which differed depending on the task. Crucially, and in contrast to subjective studies, valence effects for late bilinguals’ results were comparable to those of monolinguals on the three tasks. We will discuss how the use of different tasks can produce very different valence effects and how the relation between emotion and bilingualism varies depending on how this phenomenon is approached.