Independent influences of valence and arousal on Chinese two-character-word recognition: A bilingual perspective

Aim: Despite the significant phenomenon of bilingualism, not much evidence is available on bilinguals’ processing of affective information in their second language (L2). The present study attempts to examine the influences of valence and arousal on word recognition in L2. Methodology: Two experiments were conducted in a lexical decision task on a cohort of international students in China, who studied Chinese as their L2. The stimuli were commonly used, two-character words (2C-words) and their transposed forms (T-words), which were created by exchanging the relative positions of the constituent characters and were taken as meaningful words when read from right to left. Each experiment consisted of one sub-experiment on concrete words and one on abstract words. Data and Analysis: Three-way ANOVAs were conducted on the participants’ error rates and their reaction times for the correctly responded trials. Having a significantly lower efficiency in their task performance, the Chinese L2 learners were similar to the Chinese L1 speakers in having longer reaction times to the T-word than the word targets. Critically, a significant interaction was revealed between valence and whether the participants were L1 speakers or L2 learners (pGroup) but not between valence and whether the targets were words or T-words (cOrder) in Experiment 1; an interaction was revealed between arousal and cOrder but not between arousal and pGroup in Experiment 2. Findings and Originality: This seems to be the first finding relating to the independent influences of valence and arousal on word processing from a bilingual perspective. Significance and Implications: Future studies are expected to yield more innovative findings in relation to word processing, through manipulation of valence/arousal and participants’ language proficiency.