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Brain mechanisms of affective word processing in bilingual speakers
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
nicola del maschio1, alessia tirelli, camilla bellini, jubin abutalebi, simone sulpizio; 1Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, 2Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
Previous research has reported a reduced emotional resonance when bilinguals process linguistic information in their second language (L2). This is possibly because native languages (L1) have a distinctive emotional feel as a result of being learned or used in a specific emotional context. There are, however, other studies that report an effect of emotional content of the same magnitude in both languages, or even a larger emotional effect in L2 than in L1. Such inconsistencies may be attributable to methodological differences between studies (e.g., introspective vs. behavioral vs. psychophysiological approaches), or to the variable characteristics of the tested samples (e.g., early vs. late bilinguals; balanced vs. dominant bilinguals). We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to shed light on the neural correlates of bilinguals’ emotional processing in L1 and L2 during an emotional interference task (i.e., the Emotional Stroop Task – EST). Our sample (n = 36) comprised Italian-English bilinguals who were proficient in their L2, displayed a relatively balanced use of the two languages at time of testing, and learnt English mainly in instructional or mixed contexts (rather than via immersion). Stronger activations were observed for processing L1 versus L2 emotional words in sectors of the posteromedial cortex involved in attention modulation, memory retrieval, and affective processing. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis of a stronger emotional resonance when processing words in a L1. Moreover, in line with previous behavioral and psychophysiological evidence, it also suggests that L2 proficiency – more than other speaker-related variables – may modulate the extent to which emotional resonance is dampened in a L2. Overall, the present results offer new insights into the brain mechanisms of affective word processing in bilingual speakers, and – more broadly – on the interplay between language and affective processing.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism,