L1-L2 valence-specific effects in recall and recognition bias in sequential bilinguals

Abstract

Emotional valence and arousal influence memory recall and recognition, though findings in bilinguals vary across languages. This study examined memory performance of sequential Spanish-French bilinguals in L1 and L2, across three emotional conditions (positive, negative, and neutral), and two time-intervals. Thirty-one participants performed an encoding-retrieval task over two sessions separated by seven days. On day one, participants rated the emotionality of words and later completed a surprise recall task. After seven days, they performed a deferred free-recall task and an old/new recognition task. Immediate recall outperformed deferred recall, favouring L1 positive and L2 neutral words. Recognition was better for L2, with emotional words showing less bias than neutral. Bias also shifted across languages: L1 exhibited a conservative bias, while L2 showed a liberal bias for negative words. Overall, these results indicate that emotional and neutral words are processed and remembered differently in L1 and L2, affecting both recall and recognition.