What underlies differences in emotional expression in L1 and L2? Examining the lexical properties of narratives

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Brian Kim¹ (bs8kim@uwaterloo.ca), Myra Fernandes¹, Katherine White¹; ¹University of Waterloo

Bilingual speakers are often reported to express emotion less intensely in their L2 than their L1 (Pavlenko, 2005), yet the mechanisms underlying this attenuation remain poorly understood. The present study examines potential linguistic contributors to this difference. English monolinguals (N=70) and bilingual (N=71) participants (self-reported L2 English) produced English descriptions of silent emotional video clips from the Database of Emotional Videos from Ottawa (DEVO: Ack Baraly et al., 2020). Independent human raters (N=305) each rated a subset of transcripts for emotional expressivity on a −1 (negative) to 1 (positive) scale. Monolingual transcripts were rated as more emotionally expressive than bilingual transcripts, but only for negative videos. Examination of transcripts revealed that monolinguals produced longer descriptions than bilinguals overall. The emotionality of words was captured using the NRC Emotion Lexicon (Mohammad & Turney, 2013), which provides crowdsourced emotionality ratings for 14,182 English words. Collapsed across language groups, the density of words considered emotional predicted human coders’ expressivity ratings: increased use of emotionally charged words was associated with more extreme ratings. This held for both positive and negative transcripts. Comparisons between language groups revealed that monolinguals produced a greater density of emotionally charged words than bilinguals, aligning with human expressivity ratings. These results suggest that judgments of emotion are influenced by the density of emotionally valenced words and that this may contribute to differences in L1 and L2 emotion expressivity. Future analyses will explore why this language group difference holds only for negative emotion and examine contributions of additional lexical characteristics.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other