A Comparison of Turkish-English Bilinguals’ Processing of Emotion Words in Their Two Languages

Year 2017, , 89 - 98, 25.09.2017

Filiz Mergen , Gulmira Kuruoglu

https://doi.org/10.32601/ejal.460969

Cited By: 4

Abstract

There is a great deal of evidence showing that, in monolinguals, various emotional stimuli are processed
by the brain in different ways. This view has found considerable support from studies conducted with
verbal stimuli. In bilinguals, on the other hand, emotional processing is more complex, and is thought to
be influenced mainly by two factors; age of language acquisition and proficiency. In this study,
participants were forty-eight simultaneous / early bilinguals, who acquired both languages from birth,
and have high proficiency in both. A lexical decision task, i.e., distinguishing real words from non-words,
was used to gain insight into to how the participants processed visually presented emotion words in
Turkish and English. Reaction times and accuracy were recorded via SuperLab software program and
were statistically analyzed. Shorter response times and higher accuracy rates were found for real words
compared to non-words in both languages. Also, shorter response times were found for positive compared
to negative and neutral words in both languages. An analysis of the accuracy rates revealed no
statistically significant differences among Turkish emotion words, whereas, for English, accuracy rates
were higher for positive words when compared to negative and neutral words. These results have been
interpreted in the light of psycholinguistic models of lexical processing. 

Keywords

Bilingualism, lexical processing, emotion words, lateralization

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