Emotional activation in the first and second language

Abstract

Late Finnish–English bilinguals were presented with neutral, positive, negative and taboo words in a modified Stroop paradigm in both Finnish and English. Significant interference from negative and taboo words compared to neutral words was found in both languages, whereas positive words were not found to differ significantly from neutral words. Furthermore, no differences in the size of the interference were present between languages. This suggests that, for late bilinguals with good knowledge of their second language, the first (L1) and second (L2) language are equally capable of activating the emotional response to word stimuli representing threat, and thus interfering with the cognitive processes involved in responding to colour. This effect was equivalent for negative and taboo words.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Rochester Independent College (Rochester, Kent, UK) for providing Tiina Eilola with financial support for conducting this study, and Professor Risto Näätänen for making facilities available at the Cognitive Brain Research Unit (Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, Finland).

Notes

¹Despite the low number we also looked to see if the distribution of words not known varied between the four word categories. The mean number of words (out of a total of 20) not known were: taboo (1.32), negative (0.24), positive (0.15) and neutral (0.53). Bonferroni adjusted t-tests revealed that the number of words not known was significantly higher for the taboo words than all other word categories. Also, neutral words differed significantly from positive words. This pattern, however, does not explain the results from the response latency data.