The Mental Lexicon - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2008

To determine how differences in emotion representation and/or inhibitory ability affect adolescents’ responses to emotion words, 13-yr and 16-yr olds, as well as adults, were compared on the processing of emotion-laden and neutral words. Word ratings revealed that 16-yr olds tended towards perceiving all words as more arousing than did adults, irrespective of valence. Also, they rated words more negatively than 13-yr olds. Performance on an Affective Simon task revealed a marked incongruency effect only for 13-yr olds (and then only for negative words) but not for 16-yr olds (who responded fastest) or adults. Performance on a sustained attention task confirmed the expected age-related increase in inhibitory ability and a concomitant increase in response latencies. Our conclusions are two-fold. First, there are age-related differences in lexical representation which appear more marked for 16-yr olds. Second, 16-yr olds are more reactive, irrespective of the emotional content they are processing, yet appear to control its impact as efficiently as adults.

The representation of emotion words in memory is a relatively new area of research within the cognitive domain. In the present paper, these words will be examined with the use of the Stroop paradigm. In the past, this paradigm has been used to investigate a wide variety of word types, including color words and color-related words. Only a few studies have examined emotion words. The current study investigates a particular set of emotion words that were either congruent or incongruent with the color they were presented in (e.g., ENVY in green ink or red ink), much like standard Stroop stimuli (RED in red ink or green ink). The results of Experiment 1 revealed that emotion stimuli can be studied in the same manner as color words and color-related words, such as fire. When the congruent and incongruent items were presented together, within the same block in Experiment 2, the color items and color-related emotion items still produced a Stroop interference effect, but the color-related emotionally neutral items did not. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that evaluative information (i.e., negative valence) is automatically accessed regardless of the task at hand. The current study speaks to the need to include negative valence as an important factor in models of word recognition.

Anecdotal evidence from second language users and results from experimental studies indicate that affectively valent words are not always represented identically in a person’s first language (L1) and second language (L2) mental lexicons. The present study investigated whether such differences reflect how automatic (immediate, involuntary) the processing is of the affective element of affectively valent words, and what the relation is between this kind of processing and general word recognition efficiency for L2 words lacking affective valency. Participants were 48 L1 speakers of English with L2 French. Automaticity of processing adjectives with affective valence was operationalized using an Implicit Affect Association Task (IAAT) developed for this purpose. General efficiency in L2 word recognition was operationalized using a speeded semantic classification task with affectively neutral concrete nouns. Reaction time results from the IAAT showed that the processing of affectively valent words was less automatic in the L2 than in the L1. However, results from the semantic classification task indicated that this effect is not related to general weaker L2 word recognition abilities. Implications for an understanding of the L2 mental lexicon are discussed.

Cross-linguistic differences in emotionality of autobiographical memories were examined by eliciting memories of immigration from bilingual speakers. Forty-seven Russian-English bilinguals were asked to recount their immigration experiences in either Russian or English. Bilinguals used more emotion words when describing their immigration experiences in the second language (English) than in the first language (Russian). Bilinguals’ immigration narratives contained more negative emotion words than positive emotion words. In addition, language preference (but not language proficiency) influenced results, with emotional expression amplified when speaking in the preferred language. These findings carry implications for organization of the bilingual lexicon and the special status of emotion words within it. We suggest that bilinguals’ expression of emotion may vary across languages and that the linguistic and affective systems are interconnected in the bilingual cognitive architecture.

The purpose of the study presented here is to examine the importance of structural and conceptual (non-)equivalence in the acquisition and use of emotion words in a second language (L2). The use of these words is examined in a corpus of 206 narratives collected with two stimuli from first language (L1) speakers of Russian and English, and L2 learners of Russian and English. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses of lexical choices made by the participants show that in the case of structural non-equivalence L2 learners can shift patterns of structural selection in the mental lexicon. Thus, L2 learners of English pattern with L1 English speakers in favoring adjectival constructions in the same context where L1 and L2 Russian speakers favor verbs. Conceptual non-equivalence, on the other hand, was shown to complicate acquisition of emotion words and lead to negative transfer, lexical borrowing, and avoidance. Implications are offered for models of the bilingual mental lexicon and for L2 instruction.

The experience of embarrassment was explored in two experiments comparing monolingual and bilingual speakers from cultures varying in the degree of elaboration of the embarrassment lexicon. In Experiment 1, narratives in English or Korean depicting three types of embarrassing predicaments were to be rated on their embarrassability and humorousness by Korean-English bilinguals, Korean monolinguals, and Euro-American monolinguals. All groups judged certain predicaments (involving social gaffes) to be the most embarrassing. However, significant group and language differences occurred in judgments of the intensity of embarrassment and amusement judgments evoked. Euro-Americans exhibited higher overall levels of amusement than the two Korean groups who, in turn, reported higher levels of embarrassment, particularly for certain predicament types and contexts (ingroup members present). Further, for the bilinguals, inept performance predicaments in English were judged more embarrassing than those in Korean, whereas all predicament types were judged more amusing when framed with English emotion labels. Bilinguals also appeared to show a heightened embarrassability relative to both monolingual groups. Experiment 2 found lexical selection differences in open-ended responses to embarrassing predicaments depicted in each language, with Euro-Americans preferring to give justifications or use humor to minimize the embarrassment and Korean-English bilinguals preferring to give apologies or say nothing. The findings are interpreted to reflect the influence of culturally-mediated schemas guiding the activation and processing of emotion vocabulary.