Emotion effects on auditory word recognition for bilinguals: Differences on L1 and L2 processing

Abstract

Visual and auditory word processing differences have been reported on monolinguals;differences between people’s first (L1) and second (L2) language are, however, still adeveloping field in cognitive neuroscience. Previous research shows that word recognition ismodulated by the emotional content of the stimuli, since emotional stimuli shows betterrecognition accuracy and speed than neutral items. The aim of this study was to assessauditory emotional word recognition on L1 vs. L2. Thirty-four bilingual volunteers performedan online auditory lexical decision task in which they had to decide whether a given soundwas a word (positive, neutral, or negative) or not, either on L1 or L2. Participants were splitinto two groups: L1 (n = 18) and L2 (n = 17). Results indicated that participants showedhigher sensitivity (d’) scores for L1 than L2. Likewise, the L1 group had over all shorterresponse times. Positive words were recognized faster than neutral and negative words onlyby the L2 group. Bias index (C) analyses showed higher tendency to answer “word” forpositive items in L2 but not in L1; this group showed higher tendency to answer“pseudoword” for neutral stimuli. Therefore, even though word recognition is more efficientin L1, emotionality seems to have a differential effect on L1 and L2 for auditory processing.