Resumen de Emotional Processing of Spanish Words in L2Learners and Heritage Speakers: Interactions Between Cognateness and Emotional Valence
Claudia Helena Sánchez Gutiérrez, César Hoyos Álvarez, Kathleen S. Guerra, Paloma Fernández Mira
In monolingual speakers, words that carry a highly positive (e.g., party) or negative (e.g., suicide) valence are processed faster than neutral words, such as table. When it comes to bilingual speakers, results have been mixed and inconsistent across studies due to variation in item types (e.g., abstract vs. concrete words, emotion-label vs. emotion-laden words) and individual differences of participants (e.g., different L1 and L2, varied levels of proficiency and language dominance). This study aims to address the role of linguistic immersion (i.e., heritage speakers vs. L2 learners) and cognateness (i.e., cognates vs. non-cognates) on the processing of positive, negative, and neutral words in a lexical decision task. Results indicate that, when cognates and non-cognates are taken together, heritage speakers present faster reaction times for positive than negative words, while L2 learners show no facilitation effect for positive over negative words. Importantly, cognates also present a different processing pattern to that of non-cognates in that only non-cognate positive words, but not cognate ones, are processed faster than negative ones.
