Cross-linguistic differences affect emotion and emotion-laden word processing: Evidence from Polish-English and Romanian-English bilinguals

Aims: We study how emotions are represented in Polish-English and Romanian-English bilinguals, whose respective languages either mostly share emotion lexicon (Romanian-English) or not (Polish-English). We test to what extent such variance in lexical proximity between the two bilingual groups affects their decisions about emotional word content. Methodology: In a masked priming paradigm, participants viewed prime-target adjective pairs, and judged whether the target adjective was positive or negative in meaning. Primes and targets either named (emotion word) or evoked (emotion-laden word) emotions, and were either related – that is, belonged to one word type (emotion or emotion-laden) – or unrelated. Data and analysis: Behavioural data were analysed using linear mixed-effects models, with within-subject fixed effects of language, word type, valence and relatedness, and their interactions. Findings/conclusions: We found processing facilitation of emotion-laden rather than emotion words in both participant groups, irrespective of language of operation. Emotion target adjectives, particularly of negative valence, tended to slow down responses of Polish-English bilinguals in their first language. In the Romanian-English group, emotion target adjectives were recognized with lower accuracy in the second language. This pattern of results suggests that affective responsiveness is modulated by the lexical proximity between the first language and second language. Originality: Extending bilingual emotion research, this study tests how emotions are represented in languages that vary in lexical proximity with English: Polish and Romanian. We demonstrate that cross-linguistic differences between the respective languages of a bilingual impact emotional meaning processing in the first and second language. Significance/implications: We provide support for the emotion context-of-learning theory, language-specific episodic trace theory and the sense model in bilingualism, showing that cross-linguistic differences between the first and second language modulate emotion and emotion-laden word processing. Our findings also demonstrate that the distinction between the emotion and emotion-laden words is not as universal as previously assumed.