Nuzhdin, G. 1 & Igoa, J. M. 2
1 Moscow State University, Russia
2 Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
We have studied the acquisition of emotion words by adult native Russian learners of Spanish. In a series of free and semi-directed production experiments, we show that learners can easily acquire the emotion words that are shared across L1 and L2, which they overgeneralize, but despite many years of studying Spanish as L2, they cannot handle correctly certain L2 emotion words that are absent in Russian. Moreover, the same situations are interpreted in a different fashion by native Spanish speakers and Russian learners of Spanish. This leads us to think of emotion words in terms of elements issuing from emotion scripts: when a learner acquires an emotion word, he or she usually transfers a whole script from L1 to L2. In a series of semantic and associative priming experiments with emotion words we show that, for both native speakers and Russian learners of Spanish, there is a facilitation effect for associated words in two SOA conditions (60 and 150 msec.). However, in the SOA=150 msec. condition, there is a huge semantic inhibition in the groups of Russian learners of Spanish. We argue that these results reflect the learners’ search for scripts, a process which recruits additional neural resources.