Abstract not found

Second language speakers commonly acknowledge that taboo terms can be uttered with greater ease in their second language (L2) than in their first (L1). To investigate this phenomenon psychophysiologically, thirty-two Turkish-English bilinguals rated for pleasantness a variety of stimuli in Turkish (L1) and English (L2) while skin conductance was monitored via fingertip electrodes.

Recall of emotion words is superior to neutral words. Prior work reported in this journal (Anooshian & Hertel, 1994) found that this effect was absent in a second language. Words in a second language may thus lack the emotional associations of words acquired in childhood. To determine whether memory probes may be generally useful for assessing emotionality effects in a first vs. a second language, Anooshian and Hertel’s paradigm was extended in several ways. Recall was compared to recognition, and a variety of types of emotion words were studied, including taboo terms, and phrases likely to be learned in childhood (reprimands). Superior memory for emotion words was obtained in both the recall and recognition tasks, but this occurred in both the first and second language and indeed was stronger, for some stimuli, in the second language. This suggest that, even for bilingual speakers who acquire their second late (after age 12), words in the second language retain rich emotional associations. Emotion Word Recall and Bilingualism

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/loc ate/ijpsycho Emotion and lying in a non-native language

Bilingual speakers frequently report experiencing greater emotional resonance in their first language compared to their second. In Experiment 1, Turkish university students who had learned English as a foreign language had reduced skin conductance responses (SCRs) when listening to emotional phrases in English compared to Turkish, an effect which was most pronounced for childhood reprimands. SCRs for English were also slightly stronger for individuals who reported greater English proficiency. A second type of emotional language, reading outloud true and false statements, was studied in Experiment 2. Larger SCRs were elicited by lies compared to true statements, and larger SCRs were evoked by English statements compared to Turkish statements. In contrast, ratings of how strongly participants felt they were lying showed that Turkish lies were more strongly felt than English lies. Results suggest that two factors influence the electrodermal activity elicited when bilingual speakers lie in their two languages: arousal due to emotions associated with lying, and arousal due to anxiety about managing speech production in non-native language. Anxiety and emotionality when speaking a non-naive language need to be better understood to inform practices ranging from bilingual psychotherapy to police interrogation of suspects and witnesses. (194 words)

Emotion-memory effects occur when emotion words are more frequently recalled than neutral words. Bilingual speakers report that taboo terms and emotional phrases generate a stronger emotional response when heard or spoken in their first language. This suggests that the basic emotion-memory will be stronger for words presented in a first language. Turkish-English bilinguals performed a deep processing task (emotion intensity rating) or shallow processing task (counting letter features) and two additional deep processing tasks (translation and word association) on five categories of words (taboo words, reprimands, positive words, negative words, and neutral words), followed by a surprise recall task. Reprimands had the highest recall in English (L2), which may be a novelty effect. If reprimands are set aside, then overall emotion-memory effects were similar in the two languages, with taboo words having the highest recall, followed by positive words. Negative words had no recall advantage over neutral words, an unexpected finding. Results indicate that emotional attributes of words are equally available to boost memory in a first and second language in both shallow and deep processing tasks, athough some task-specific effects did occur. (183 words) 3 Emotion–memory effects in bilingual speakers: A levels-of-processing approach