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

In this study we explore a student’s affective responses to classroom foreign language learning. In 2 meetings each week throughout an 8-week Portuguese course for beginners, the first author described her language learning experiences to the second author. Sessions were transcribed and then coded and analyzed. A theoretical model grounded in the learner’s experiences was developed to understand the learner’s affective responses to the language learning process, the events from which her affect sprang, and her affective trajectory over the 8 weeks. This study is a response to the need for methodological and epistemological diversity in second language acquisition research and contributes to studies that focus on the affective responses of the learner to the language learning experience. Implications for the role played by emotion in learners ’ classroom foreign language learning and the development of sociocultural competence in a second language are discussed. ALTHOUGH LEARNERS IN ONE FOREIGN language classroom are exposed to the same lessons, each individual may process lessons differently, resulting in very different language learning experiences. For example, in a study of learners’ beliefs about the language learning process, some described their experience as “traveling to new places, ” whereas others described their experience as “undergoing a painful medical procedure” (Kramsch, 2003, p. 116). These vastly different interpretations of the language learning experience illustrate its uniqueness for each individual. Learner accounts, which tend to focus on the affective (emotional) responses of the learner to the language learning process, not only supply information about how different learners

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