The Effect of Language Dominance on Bilingual Emotional Processing: A Behavioral and ERP Study

Poster Session D - Monday, April 15, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Nicole Vargas Fuentes¹ (nvargasf@uci.edu), Judith Kroll¹; ¹University of California, Irvine

Bilinguals experience heightened emotions in their first language, L1. Studies demonstrating the emotional asymmetry across languages have examined bilinguals whose L1 is the native and dominant language. The present study asked whether heritage bilinguals who speak a language at home in which they are no longer dominant, will show an effect of emotion in the societal language (SL) in which they have become dominant. Heritage bilinguals with a variety of home languages completed a Face-Word Emotional Stroop task in their SL, English. They judged the emotionality of faces (fear vs happy) while ignoring a congruent or incongruent emotion word. They also completed a questionnaire that provided an index of their language dominance. Stroop performance was measured using behavior and EEG. Behavioral results showed that like studies with L1-dominant bilinguals, English-dominant heritage speakers were slower and less accurate on incongruent than congruent trials, suggesting a strong emotional Stroop effect in the SL. ERP data showed that unlike L1-dominant bilinguals, who show stages of conflict resolution in both early (350-550ms) and late (700-900ms) epochs, heritage bilinguals showed conflict resolution only in the late epoch. They also showed a stronger N2 component. Although the behavioral results appear similar across different types of bilinguals, the pattern of brain activity suggests a different time-course for emotional conflict resolution in heritage bilinguals.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other