Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
ERP markers of emotional engagement in response to culture-related concepts in L1 and L2
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Francesca M.M. Citron1, Yanxi Lu1, Bo Yao1, Kate Cain1; 1Lancaster University
Bilinguals frequently report reduced emotional engagement in their second language (L2), a phenomenon known as L2 emotional distance (Pavlenko, 2012; Hsu et al., 2015). While extensive research has examined the role of linguistic factors such as proficiency and age of acquisition on emotional engagement, the role of cultural context in modulating this experience remains underexplored. And we know that language and culture are highly intertwined. So, could it be the case that reduced emotive responses to an L2 are due to culture-specific topics that do not resonate with the L2 speaker or learner? This study investigates how concepts related to the native or second culture affect emotive neural responses to emotionally valenced words compared to concepts that are not related to either culture, in late bilinguals. Thirty-four late Mandarin-English bilinguals residing in the UK performed a valence judgment task (positive vs. neutral) in both their L1 (Mandarin) and L2 (English), while their electroencephalographic activity (EEG) was recorded. Stimuli consisted of positive and neutral single words or word pairs that were either related to Chinese culture (e.g., dumpling), British culture (e.g., scones), or unrelated to either (e.g., sake). We analysed reaction times (RTs) and two event-related potential (ERP) components known to index processing of emotive content: the Early Posterior Negativity (EPN), indexing early automatic attention toward evolutionary relevant stimuli, and the Late Positive Component (LPC), reflecting sustained evaluative processing of such stimuli. Behavioural results revealed a robust positivity advantage (faster RTs for positive words) in both languages, suggesting successful access to emotional semantics. However, the neural data demonstrated a striking dissociation between languages. In the L2 (English), processing was characterised by a classic emotionality effect: positive words elicited significantly larger EPN amplitudes than neutral words (e.g., Citron, 2012), indicating that L2 emotional items successfully captured early automatic attention. In contrast, L1 (Mandarin) processing showed no such valence effects; instead, significant main effects of culture relatedness on both the EPN and LPC components were shown, with larger amplitudes in response to the native culture compared to unrelated words. Our findings suggest that culture relatedness can influence the affective processing of words by modulating neural responses, and provide new evidence that culture relatedness shapes bilinguals’ emotional experiences at both behavioural and neural levels, above and beyond the well-established overall “emotional distance” from the L2.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Meaning: Lexical Semantics