Emotionality ratings and electrodermal responses to university-related expressions in a native and a non-native language

ABSTRACT

To what extent does emotional reactivity differ when bilinguals process input in their native (L1) or non-native language (L2)? Does the L1 elicit a significantly stronger emotional arousal or can salient second language experience generate comparably strong associations between emotions and the L2? These questions were addressed through two measures of emotional arousal, (online) skin conductance responses (SCR) and (offline) emotionality ratings. Russian-English late bilinguals, UK university students, were presented different types of university-related expressions in English and Russian. The vocabulary types were university-related emotionally-laden expressions (‘Плагиат’/‘Plagiarism’) and neutral words (‘Круг’/‘Circle’). Two main results emerged. First, in L1, SCRs showed a significantly increased electro-dermal activity when participants reacted to university-related words. Emotionality ratings showed contrasts based on stimulus type in both languages. These results indicate that university-related words qualify as a category of emotionally charged expressions. Second, between-language tests showed that electrodermal reactivity was not more reduced in L2 than in L1, which was also mirrored in emotionality ratings. These findings are located within the existing empirical context, and alternative interpretations are provided to further our understanding of how an emotionally salient L2 context contributes to shifts from mother tongue dominance to an increased emotional power of the second language.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• emotional reactivity
• skin conductance responses
• emotionality ratings
• university-related expressions

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Yeraly Baizhanov for his help with data collection. A part of the research reported in this study was funded by a grant awarded to Norbert Vanek by the Department of Education, University of York. Some ideas presented in this work build on the dissertation of Artem Tovalovich submitted to the same department.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Norbert Vanek

Norbert Vanek is a senior lecturer at the School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, University of Auckland, New Zealand. His main research interests are bilingual cognition, linguistic relativity, event processing and open science.

Artem Tovalovich

Artem Tovalovich was a graduate student (2018-2019) at the University of York, where his research interests involved bilingual education and emotionality in a second language.