Effects of learning contexts on emotional responses to emotion-related words for late bilinguals.

摘要

Bilinguals' language emotionality may be affected by a number of factors such as language acquisition order, age of language acquisition, proficiency, and language learning environment. Research in bilingual emotionality has produced conflicting results. One possible factor that contributed to these different results is the impact of language learning context on the development of language emotionality. The use of different measures of language emotionality further complicated the interpretation of the different findings across studies. The current study was designed to achieve two main goals: (1) to investigate the influence of language learning contexts on bilinguals' language emotionality; (2) to evaluate whether different objective measures of language emotionality produce converging evidence for the test of effects of learning contexts on language emotionality. It was hypothesized that the emotionality of words in a given language depends on the language learning environment, the socio-cultural environment of the language being learned, and how learners relate to the specific words or concepts in a given socio-cultural environment.;The findings suggested that it takes a significant amount of time for late bilinguals to develop comparable levels of language emotionality in the second language. The effect of learning context on language was moderated by the length of stay in a naturalistic learning environment for the second language. Such results argued for a dynamic model for the conceptual representation of bilingual lexicon. The data also suggested that results produced by different objective measures of language emotionality were comparable yet varied in levels of sensitivity. The differences in the results for the test of primary hypothesis were discussed in terms of nature of dependent measures and the transfer-appropriate processing hypothesis.;The sample consisted of 47 late Chinese-English bilinguals recruited from the University of Utah and the general Chinese community in Salt Lake City, Utah. Each participant rated their proficiency in Chinese and English. They also completed a word pleasantness rating task, a recall task, the emotional Stroop task, and a language history questionnaire. Electrodermal and blood pressure data were collected during the pleasantness rating task. Planned comparisons for repeated measures were conducted to test the hypothesis that language learning context influences bilinguals' language emotionality.