The automatic activation of emotion words measured using the emotional face-word Stroop task in late Chinese–English bilinguals

ABSTRACT

In the current study, late Chinese–English bilinguals performed a facial expression identification task with emotion words in the task-irrelevant dimension, in either their first language (L1) or second language (L2). The investigation examined the automatic access of the emotional content in words appearing in more than one language. Significant congruency effects were present for both L1 and L2 emotion word processing. Furthermore, the magnitude of emotional face-word Stroop effect in the L1 task was greater as compared to the L2 task, indicating that in L1 participants could access the emotional information in words in a more reliable manner. In summary, these findings provide more support for the automatic access of emotional information in words in the bilinguals’ two languages as well as attenuated emotionality of L2 processing.

KEYWORDS:

• Automatic access
• emotion word
• congruency effects
• emotional Stroop task
• emotional face-word Stroop task

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number: 31540024]; National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education (MOE Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Universities) in Beijing Foreign Studies University and the Department of Finance of China (the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities) [grant number: 2017JJ001].