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Processing Emotional Words in a Second Language Across Visual and Auditory Modalities: An ERP Study
Poster Session D, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Wenkang Luo1, Werner Sommer2, Nan Li1; 1School of Foreign Studies, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China, 2Department of Psychology, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
Recognizing emotions in a second language (L2) is an indispensable skill for cross-cultural communication. However, due to the lack of rich, immersive contextual emotional learning experiences available to native speakers, the mechanisms by which L2 learners extract emotional valence from words to influence recognition remain unclear. Previous research on L2 emotional word processing has predominantly used visual presentation (i.e., written words), yet in daily communication, a substantial amount of emotional information is conveyed through the auditory channel. In contrast to the instantaneous, simultaneous presentation of information in written words, spoken words unfold over time. This fundamental modality difference may lead to distinct temporal dynamics in emotional processing. Therefore, we compared emotional word processing across auditory and visual modalities to assess the modality-specificity of emotion recognition in L2. Fifty advanced Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners (average age = 23.43, 32 female) performed a categorization task on three types of emotional valence (positive, negative, neutral) of words presented in both auditory and visual modalities, while EEG was recorded. In the visual modality, the N170 and EPN components in the ERPs to both positive and negative words were larger than neutral words, indicating that emotional words are distinguished at the early stages of processing, with symmetrical effects for positive and negative valence. In the auditory modality, relative to neutral words, positive words elicited P200, EPN, and N400 effects, whereas negative words showed no significant effects, revealing a clear positivity advantage. These results indicate that emotional content in L2 words can be rapidly extracted in both modalities, but the temporal dynamics and valence patterns demonstrate modality-specificity. In the visual modality, emotional valence modulates early processing in a symmetrical manner, whereas the auditory modality shows a positivity advantage and deeper integrative processing. This suggests that emotional word processing in L2 is a differentiated process sensitive to the modality of sensory input.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics,