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Having an easier time traveling, watching movies without subtitles, being able to communicate with people from different cultures and places, having a better curriculum... all of that is well known as advantages of being bilingual. However, recent researchers have found out benefits to the brain that go far beyond that. Scientists have come to the conclusion that the brain of a bilingual or multilingual person actually works and looks different than the brain of a monolingual one. Studies that show the great benefits of being bilingual have changed completely the way bilingualism, especially in childhood, is seen.

Although it is known that all types of bilingual people can become fluent, the time and the way in which the language acquisition is given changes the effect it has on the brain. This is explained by the differences in the brain's both hemispheres most dominant abilities. It is proved by science that the brain's left side is more dominant in analytical and logical processes, while the right side of the brain is responsible for the emotional and social behaviors. This lateralization is developed gradually with age, and the language acquisition process requires the use of all of these functions. Putting all of this information together, the Critical Period Hypothesis was developed:

According to this theory, children learn languages more easily because of the plasticity of their developing brains, which lets them use both hemispheres in language acquisition, while in most adults, their language acquisition is lateralized to one hemisphere, usually the left. If this is true, learning a language in childhood may give more of a realistic grasp of its social and emotional contexts. Conversely, recent research showed that people who learned a second language in adulthood exhibit less emotional bias and a more rational approach when confronting problems in their second language than in their native one.

Here's a summary of what bilingual brains do differently according to the study:

They show a higher density of the gray matter that contains most of the brain's neurons and synapses.

They show more activity in certain regions when engaging a second language.

The high workout a bilingual brain receives throughout its life can also help delay the onset of diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia by as much as 5 years.

You can check out more of this information in the video below:

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Renata was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She is an International Relations student at PUC-MG and a Marketing Intern at ABC Multicultural. She studied English for many years and will soon study Italian abroad. So far, bilingualism has opened many doors for her and made many of her professional goals achievable. Renata believes in the benefits of raising bilingual children and preparing them to live in a globalized world.

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The great effects of bilingualism on the brain - ABC Multicultural

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Having an easier time traveling, watching movies without subtitles, being able to communicate with people from different cultures and places, having a better curriculum... all of that is well known as advantages of being bilingual. However, recent researchers have found out benefits to the brain that go far beyond that.

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It's one of life's truths: Being bilingual or multilingual can only be considered a good thing. The ability to travel seamlessly in another country; to interact with people you wouldn't otherwise be able to communicate with; to really understand and immerse yourself in another culture, whether it be your own or another's; and on the most trivial level, to order off a menu and truly know what you're ordering.

But aside from all these reasons, there is a multitude of research showing how speaking more than one language is also good for your health -- particularly, the health of your brain. Here's where the bilingual among us have an advantage:
They have better "cognitive flexibility."
Older adults who have spoken two languages since childhood seem to have better cognitive flexibility -- meaning, they are better able to go with the flow in the face of a new or unexpected circumstance -- than adults who only speak one language, according to a Journal of Neuroscience study. The study involved having participants complete a cognitive flexibility task; while monolingual and bilingual adults were both able to complete the task, the bilingual adults did it more quickly and certain parts of their brains used less energy to do so.
Their brains stay sharper in old age.
And this is true even for people who learned a second language later in life, according to a recent study in the Annals of Neurology. The study involved following native English speakers who took an intelligence test when they were age 11, and then again when they were in their early 70s. People who spoke two or more languages had greater cognitive abilities -- particularly in general intelligence and reading -- from their baseline, compared with those who only spoke one language.

They look at certain words in a different way than their monolingual counterparts.

People who speak two languages may process certain words faster, particularly if the word has the same meaning in both languages, according to a Psychological Science study. Using eye-movement technology, researchers found that bilingual people spend less time looking at "cognate words" -- words that have the same meaning in two languages, such as the word "sport" for both English and Dutch -- which suggests their brains need less time to process the word, Scientific American reported.
While not immune to Alzheimer's, they may experience a delay in developing the condition.
Alzheimer's can strike anyone, but people who are bilingual may develop the condition four to five years later than people who only speak one language, according to findings presented at a 2011 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The study included 450 Alzheimer's patients, half of whom had been bilingual for most of their lives.

As kids, they have a leg up on problem-solving skills.

Bilingual kids seem to do better on tasks examining problem-solving skills and creativity, according to a study in the International Journal of Bilingualism. The study included 121 children, about half of whom were bilingual, who were asked to complete tasks involving repeating number series, solving math problems mentally, and reproducing color block patterns, HealthDay reported.
Their brains are better switchers.
Bilingual kids may be speedier at switching between tasks, according to a Child Development study. The study involved having bilingual and monolingual children look at images of animals or depictions of colors on a computer screen. When the children were asked to press a button to switch between images of animals to images of colors, the bilingual children did this faster than the monolingual children.
They can use their ability to think in another language to make better decisions.
When people think in another language, they are more likely to make rational decisions in a problem scenario, a 2012 Psychological Study showed. Because people are naturally averse to loss, they tend to make decisions that minimize loss, even if the odds are in their favor. But University of Chicago researchers found that when people think in a foreign language, it provides distancing -- which could help them make more deliberate, less emotion-based decisions. "Perhaps the most important mechanism for the effect is that a foreign language has less emotional resonance than a native tongue," study researcher Sayuri Hayakawa said in a statement. "An emotional reaction could lead to decisions that are motivated more by fear than by hope, even when the odds are highly favorable."

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7 Reasons Why It's Good To Speak Another Language

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It's one of life's truths: Being bilingual or multilingual can only be considered a good thing. The ability to travel seamlessly in another country; to interact with people you wouldn't otherwise be able to communicate with; to really understand and immerse yourself in another culture, whether it be your own or another's; and on the most trivial level, to order off a menu and truly know what you're ordering.

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In a cafe in south London, two construction workers are engaged in cheerful banter, tossing words back and forth. Their cutlery dances during more emphatic gesticulations and they occasionally break off into loud guffaws. They are discussing a woman, that much is clear, but the details are lost on me. It's a shame, because their conversation looks fun and interesting, especially to a nosy person like me. But I don't speak their language.

Out of curiosity, I interrupt them to ask what they are speaking. With friendly smiles, they both switch easily to English, explaining that they are South Africans and had been speaking Xhosa. In Johannesburg, where they are from, most people speak at least five languages, says one of them, Theo Morris. For example, Theo's mother's language is Sotho, his father's is Zulu, he learned Xhosa and Ndebele from his friends and neighbours, and English and Afrikaans at school. "I went to Germany before I came here, so I also speak German," he adds.

Was it easy to learn so many languages?

"Yes, it's normal," he laughs.

He's right. Around the world, more than half of people - estimates vary from 60 to 75 per cent - speak at least two languages. Many countries have more than one official national language - South Africa has 11. People are increasingly expected to speak, read and write at least one of a handful of "super" languages, such as English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish or Arabic, as well. So to be monolingual, as many native English speakers are, is to be in the minority, and perhaps to be missing out.

Multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages. Moreover, researchers are finding a swathe of health benefits from speaking more than one language, including faster stroke recovery and delayed onset of dementia.

Could it be that the human brain evolved to be multilingual - that those who speak only one language are not exploiting their full potential? And in a world that is losing languages faster than ever - at the current rate of one a fortnight, half our languages will be extinct by the end of the century - what will happen if the current rich diversity of languages disappears and most of us end up speaking only one?

I am sitting in a laboratory, headphones on, looking at pictures of snowflakes on a computer. As each pair of snowflakes appears, I hear a description of one of them through the headphones. All I have to do is decide which snowflake is being described. The only catch is that the descriptions are in a completely invented language called Syntaflake.

It's part of an experiment by Panos Athanasopoulos, an ebullient Greek with a passion for languages. Professor of psycholinguistics and bilingual cognition at Lancaster University, he's at the forefront of a new wave of research into the bilingual mind. As you might expect, his lab is a Babel of different nationalities and languages - but no one here grew up speaking Syntaflake.

The task is profoundly strange and incredibly difficult. Usually, when interacting in a foreign language, there are clues to help you decipher the meaning. The speaker might point to the snowflake as they speak, use their hands to demonstrate shapes or their fingers to count out numbers, for example. Here I have no such clues and, it being a made-up language, I can't even rely on picking up similarities to languages I already know.

After a time, though, I begin to feel a pattern might be emerging with the syntax and sounds. I decide to be mathematical about it and get out pen and paper to plot any rules that emerge, determined not to "fail" the test.

The experience reminds me of a time I arrived in a rural town a few hours outside Beijing and was forced to make myself understood in a language I could neither speak nor read, among people for whom English was similarly alien. But even then, there had been clues... Now, without any accompanying human interaction, the rules governing the sounds I'm hearing remain elusive, and at the end of the session I have to admit defeat.

I join Athanasopoulos for a chat while my performance is being analysed by his team.

Glumly, I recount my difficulties at learning the language, despite my best efforts. But it appears that was where I went wrong: "The people who perform best on this task are the ones who don't care at all about the task and just want to get it over as soon as possible. Students and teaching staff who try to work it out and find a pattern always do worst," he says.

"It's impossible in the time given to decipher the rules of the language and make sense of what's being said to you. But your brain is primed to work it out subconsciously. That's why, if you don't think about it, you'll do okay in the test - children do the best."

The first words ever uttered may have been as far back as 250,000 years ago, once our ancestors stood up on two legs and freed the ribcage from weight-bearing tasks, allowing fine nerve control of breathing and pitch to develop. And when humans had got one language, it wouldn't have been long before we had many.

Language evolution can be compared to biological evolution, but whereas genetic change is driven by environmental pressures, languages change and develop through social pressures. Over time, different groups of early humans would have found themselves speaking different languages. Then, in order to communicate with other groups - for trade, travel and so on - it would have been necessary for some members of a family or band to speak other tongues.

We can get some sense of how prevalent multilingualism may have been from the few hunter-gatherer peoples who survive today. "If you look at modern hunter-gatherers, they are almost all multilingual," says Thomas Bak, a cognitive neurologist who studies the science of languages at the University of Edinburgh. "The rule is that one mustn't marry anyone in the same tribe or clan to have a child - it's taboo. So every single child's mum and dad speak a different language."

In Aboriginal Australia, where more than 130 indigenous languages are still spoken, multilingualism is part of the landscape. "You will be walking and talking with someone, and then you might cross a small river and suddenly your companion will switch to another language," says Bak. "People speak the language of the earth." This is true elsewhere, too. "Consider in Belgium: you take a train in Liège, the announcements are in French first. Then, pass through Loewen, where the announcements will be in Dutch first, and then in Brussels it reverts back to French first."

The connection with culture and geography is why Athanasopoulos invented a new language for the snowflake test. Part of his research lies in trying to tease out the language from the culture it is threaded within, he explains.

Being so bound up with identity, language is also deeply political. The emergence of European nation states and the growth of imperialism during the 19th century meant it was regarded as disloyal to speak anything other than the one national language. This perhaps contributed to the widely held opinion - particularly in Britain and the US - that bringing up children to be bilingual was harmful to their health and to society more generally.

There were warnings that bilingual children would be confused by two languages, have lower intelligence, low self-esteem, behave in deviant ways, develop a split personality and even become schizophrenic. It is a view that persisted until very recently, discouraging many immigrant parents from using their own mother tongue to speak to their children, for instance. This is in spite of a 1962 experiment, ignored for decades, which showed that bilingual children did better than monolinguals in both verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests.

However, research in the last decade by neurologists, psychologists and linguists, using the latest brain-imaging tools, is revealing a swathe of cognitive benefits for bilinguals. It's all to do with how our ever-flexible minds learn to multitask.
Split personality
Ask me in English what my favourite food is, and I will picture myself in London choosing from the options I enjoy there. But ask me in French, and I transport myself to Paris, where the options I'll choose from are different. So the same deeply personal question gets a different answer depending on the language in which you're asking me. This idea that you gain a new personality with every language you speak, that you act differently when speaking different languages, is a profound one.

Athanasopoulos and his colleagues have been studying the capacity for language to change people's perspectives. In one experiment, English and German speakers were shown videos of people moving, such as a woman walking towards her car or a man cycling to the supermarket. English speakers focus on the action and typically describe the scene as "a woman is walking" or "a man is cycling". German speakers, on the other hand, have a more holistic worldview and will include the goal of the action: they might say (in German) "a woman walks towards her car" or "a man cycles towards the supermarket".

Part of this is due to the grammatical toolkit available, Athanasopoulos explains. Unlike German, English has the -ing ending to describe actions that are ongoing. This makes English speakers much less likely than German speakers to assign a goal to an action when describing an ambiguous scene. When he tested English-German bilinguals, however, whether they were action- or goal-focused depended on which country they were tested in. If the bilinguals were tested in Germany, they were goal-focused; in England, they were action-focused, no matter which language was used, showing how intertwined culture and language can be in determining a person's worldview.

In the 1960s, one of the pioneers of psycholinguistics, Susan Ervin-Tripp, tested Japanese-English bilingual women, asking them to finish sentences in each language. She found that the women ended the sentences very differently depending on which language was used. For example, "When my wishes conflict with my family..." was completed in Japanese as "it is a time of great unhappiness"; in English, as "I do what I want". Another example was "Real friends should...", which was completed as "help each other" in Japanese and "be frank" in English.

From this, Ervin-Tripp concluded that human thought takes place within language mindsets, and that bilinguals have different mindsets for each language - an extraordinary idea but one that has been borne out in subsequent studies, and many bilinguals say they feel like a different person when they speak their other language.

These different mindsets are continually in conflict, however, as bilingual brains sort out which language to use.

In a revealing experiment with his English-German bilingual group, Athanasopoulos got them to recite strings of numbers out loud in either German or English. This effectively "blocked" the other language altogether, and when they were shown the videos of movement, the bilinguals' descriptions were more action- or goal-focused depending on which language had been blocked.

So, if they recited numbers in German, their responses to the videos were more typically German and goal-focused. When the number recitation was switched to the other language midway, their video responses also switched.

So what's going on? Are there really two separate minds in a bilingual brain? That's what the snowflake experiment was designed to find out. I'm a little nervous of what my fumbling performance will reveal about me, but Athanasopoulos assures me I'm similar to others who have been tested - and so far, we seem to be validating his theory.

In order to assess the effect that trying to understand the Syntaflake language had on my brain, I took another test before and after the snowflake task. In these so-called flanker tasks, patterns of arrows appeared on the screen and I had to press the left or right button according to the direction of the arrow in the centre. Sometimes the surrounding pattern of arrows was confusing, so by the end of the first session my shoulders had been hunched somewhere near my ears and I was exhausted from concentrating. It's not a task in which practice improves performance (most people actually do worse second time round), but when I did the same test again after completing the snowflake task, I was significantly better at it, just as Athanasopoulos has predicted.

"Learning the new language improved your performance second time around," he explains. Relieved as I am to fit into the normal range, it's a curious result. How can that be?

The flanker tasks were exercises in cognitive conflict resolution - if most of the arrows were pointing to the left, my immediate impulse was to push the left button, but this wasn't the correct response if the central arrow was pointing right. I had to block out my impulse and heed the rule instead. Another example of cognitive conflict is a test in which the names of colours are written in different colours ("blue" written in red, for example). The aim is to say which colour each word is written in, but this is tricky, because we read the word much quicker than we process the colour of the letters. It requires considerable mental effort to ignore the impulse just to say the word we can't help but read.

The part of the brain that manages this supreme effort is known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), part of the "executive system". Located on the frontal lobe, it is a toolbox of mental attention skills that enables us to concentrate on one task while blocking out competing information, and allows us to switch focus between different tasks without becoming confused. It is the executive system that tells us to go when we see a green light and stop for a red, and it is the same system that tells us to ignore the meaning of the word we read but concentrate on the colour of the letters.

The snowflake test prepared my ACC for the second flanker task, just as speaking more than one language seems to train the executive system more generally. A steady stream of studies over the past decade has shown that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a range of cognitive and social tasks from verbal and nonverbal tests to how well they can read other people. Greater empathy is thought to be because bilinguals are better at blocking out their own feelings and beliefs in order to concentrate on the other person's.

"Bilinguals perform these tasks much better than monolinguals - they are faster and more accurate," says Athanasopoulos. And that suggests their executive systems are different from monolinguals'.
Mental muscles
In fact, says cognitive neuropsychologist Jubin Abutalebi, at the University of San Raffaele in Milan, it is possible to distinguish bilingual people from monolinguals simply by looking at scans of their brains. "Bilingual people have significantly more grey matter than monolinguals in their anterior cingulate cortex, and that is because they are using it so much more often," he says. The ACC is like a cognitive muscle, he adds: the more you use it, the stronger, bigger and more flexible it gets.

Bilinguals, it turns out, exercise their executive control all the time because their two languages are constantly competing for attention. Brain-imaging studies show that when a bilingual person is speaking in one language, their ACC is continually suppressing the urge to use words and grammar from their other language. Not only that, but their mind is always making a judgement about when and how to use the target language. For example, bilinguals rarely get confused between languages, but they may introduce the odd word or sentence of the other language if the person they are talking to also knows it.

"My mother tongue is Polish but my wife is Spanish so I also speak Spanish, and we live in Edinburgh so we also speak English," says Thomas Bak. "When I am talking to my wife in English, I will sometimes use Spanish words, but I never accidentally use Polish. And when I am speaking to my wife's mother in Spanish, I never accidentally introduce English words because she doesn't understand them. It's not something I have to think about, it's automatic, but my executive system is working very hard to inhibit the other languages."

For bilinguals, with their exceptionally buff executive control, the flanker test is just a conscious version of what their brains do subconsciously all day long - it's no wonder they are good at it.

A superior ability to concentrate, solve problems and focus, better mental flexibility and multitasking skills are, of course, valuable in everyday life. But perhaps the most exciting benefit of bilingualism occurs in ageing, when executive function typically declines: bilingualism seems to protect against dementia.

Psycholinguist Ellen Bialystok made the surprising discovery at York University in Toronto while she was comparing an ageing population of monolinguals and bilinguals.

"The bilinguals showed symptoms of Alzheimer's some four to five years after monolinguals with the same disease pathology," she says.

Being bilingual didn't prevent people from getting dementia, but it delayed its effects, so in two people whose brains showed similar amounts of disease progression, the bilingual would show symptoms an average of five years after the monolingual. Bialystok thinks this is because bilingualism rewires the brain and improves the executive system, boosting people's "cognitive reserve". It means that as parts of the brain succumb to damage, bilinguals can compensate more because they have extra grey matter and alternative neural pathways.

"Bilinguals use their frontal processors for tasks that monolinguals don't and so these processors become reinforced and better in the frontal lobe. And this is used to compensate during degeneration of the middle parts of the brain," Bialystok explains. However, it is no good simply to have learned a little French at school. The effect depends on how often you use your bilingual skill. "The more you use it, the better," she says, "but there's no breaking point, it's a continuum."

Bilingualism can also offer protection after brain injury. In a recent study of 600 stroke survivors in India, Bak discovered that cognitive recovery was twice as likely for bilinguals as for monolinguals.

Such results suggest bilingualism helps keep us mentally fit. It may even be an advantage that evolution has positively selected for in our brains - an idea supported by the ease with which we learn new languages and flip between them, and by the pervasiveness of bilingualism throughout world history. Just as we need to do physical exercise to maintain the health of bodies that evolved for a physically active hunter-gatherer lifestyle, perhaps we ought to start doing more cognitive exercises to maintain our mental health, especially if we only speak one language.

In recent years, there has been a backlash against the studies showing benefits from bilingualism. Some researchers tried and failed to replicate some of the results; others questioned the benefits of improved executive function in everyday life. Bak wrote a rejoinder to the published criticisms, and says there is now overwhelming evidence from psychological experiments backed by imaging studies that bilingual and monolingual brains function differently. He says the detractors have made errors in their experimental methods.

Bialystok agrees, adding that it is impossible to examine whether bilingualism improves a child's school exam results because there are so many confounding factors. But, she says, "given that at the very least it makes no difference - and no study has ever shown it harms performance - considering the very many social and cultural benefits to knowing another language, bilingualism should be encouraged". As for the financial benefits, one estimate puts the value of knowing a second language at up to $128,000 over 40 years.

The result of my test in Athanasopoulos's lab suggests that just 45 minutes of trying to understand another language can improve cognitive function. His study is not yet complete, but other research has shown that these benefits of learning a language can be achieved quickly. The problem is, they disappear again unless they are used - and I am unlikely to use the made-up snowflake language ever again! Learning a new language is not the only way to improve executive function - playing video games, learning a musical instrument, even certain card games can help - but because we use language all the time, it's probably the best executive-function exerciser there is. So how can this knowledge be applied in practice?

One option is to teach children in different languages. In many parts of the world, this is already being done: many Indian children, for example, will use a different language in school from their mother or village tongue. But in English-speaking nations, it is rare. Nevertheless, there is a growing movement towards so-called immersion schooling, in which children are taught in another language half the time. The state of Utah has been pioneering the idea, with many of its schools now offering immersion in Mandarin Chinese or Spanish.

"We use a half-day model, so the target language is used to teach in the morning, and then English is used in the afternoon - then this is swapped on other days as some learn better in the morning and some in the afternoon," explains Gregg Roberts, who works with the Utah Office of State Education and has championed immersion language teaching in the state. "We have found that the kids do as well and generally better than monolingual counterparts in all subjects. They are better at concentrating, focusing and have a lot more self-esteem. Anytime you understand another language, you understand your language and culture better. It is economically and socially beneficial. We need to get over our affliction with monolingualism."

The immersion approach is being trialled in the UK now, too. At Bohunt secondary school in Liphook, Hampshire, head teacher Neil Strowger has introduced Chinese-language immersion for a few lessons.

I sit in on an art class with 12-year-olds being taught by two teachers: one speaking English, the other Chinese. The children are engaged but quiet, concentrating on the task of learning multiple ideas. When they speak it is often in Chinese - and there is something rather surreal about watching young people in the UK discussing British graffiti artist Banksy in Mandarin. The children say they chose to learn in Chinese because they thought it would be "fun" and "interesting" and "useful" - a far cry from the dreary French lessons I endured at school.

The majority of the art class will take their Chinese GCSE exams several years early but Strowger tells me the programme has had many benefits in addition to their grades, including improving students' engagement and enjoyment, increasing their awareness of other cultures so that they are equipped as global citizens, widening their horizons, and improving their job prospects.

What about those of us who have left school? In order to maintain the benefits of bilingualism, you need to use your languages and that can be tricky, especially for older people who may not have many opportunities to practise. Perhaps we need language clubs, where people can meet to speak other languages. Bak has done a small pilot study with elderly people learning Gaelic in Scotland and seen significant benefits after just one week. Now he aims to carry out a much larger trial.

It is never too late to learn another tongue, and it can be very rewarding. Alex Rawlings is a British professional polyglot who speaks 15 languages: "Each language gives you a whole new lifestyle, a whole new shade of meaning," he says. "It's addictive!"

"People say it's too hard as an adult. But I would say it's much easier after the age of eight. It takes three years for a baby to learn a language, but just months for an adult."

As the recent research shows, that's a worthwhile investment of time. Being bilingual could keep our minds working longer and better into old age, which could have a massive impact on how we school our children and treat older people. In the meantime, it makes sense to talk, hablar, parler, sprechen, beszel, berbicara in as many languages as you can.

--
This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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In a cafe in south London, two construction workers are engaged in cheerful banter, tossing words back and forth. Their cutlery dances during more emphatic gesticulations and they occasionally break off into loud guffaws. They are discussing a woman, that much is clear, but the details are lost on me.

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Abstract

Neurobilingualism research has failed to reveal significant language differences in the processing of affective content. However, the evidence to date derives mostly from studies in which affective stimuli are presented out of context, which is unnatural and fails to capture the complexity of everyday sentence-based communication. Here we investigated semantic integration of affectively salient stimuli in sentential context in the first- and second-language (L2) of late fluent Polish-English bilinguals living in the UK. The 19 participants indicated whether Polish and English sentences ending with a semantically and affectively congruent or incongruent adjective of controlled affective valence made sense while undergoing behavioral and electrophysiological recordings. We focused on the N400, a wave of event-related potentials known to index semantic integration. We expected N400 amplitude to index increased processing demands in L2 English comprehension and potential language-valence interactions to reveal differences in affective processing between languages. Contrary to our initial expectation, we found increased N400 for sentences in L1 Polish, possibly driven by greater affective salience of sentences in the native language. Critically, language interacted with affective valence, such that N400 amplitudes were reduced for English sentences ending in a negative fashion as compared to all other conditions. We interpreted this as a sign that bilinguals suppress L2 content embedded in naturalistic L2 sentences when it has negative valence, thus extending the findings of previous research on single words in clinical and linguistic research.

Keywords: Affect, L2, ERP, N400, LPC

Affect permeates social interaction, and is a faithful companion of our perceptions of the world (Bromberek-Dyzman, 2014; Kopytko, 2004; Zajonc, 1984). It is often at the origin of our thoughts, it determines behavior, and it influences decision making. Language is naturally a key means of expression and perception of affective information. In today's multilingual world (Grosjean, 1984, 2010), proficient communication in more than one language is not just an asset, it has become the norm. This has important bearing on the investigation of affective language processing because drawing a faithful picture of bilingual communicative encounters will require distinguishing between native and nonnative language. This, in turn, may lay the foundation for formal communicative strategies, for instance, in legal or pathological situations. Previous studies have shown that affective experience may be contingent upon the language-first or second-of bilinguals in which information is communicated (Pavlenko, 2012). For instance, clinical studies focusing on the expression of emotions have consistently reported that the L2 represents a kind of asylum for patients discussing highly emotional and/or traumatic experiences (e.g., Aragno & Schlachet, 1996; Burbridge, Larsen, & Barch, 2005; Dewaele & Costa, 2013; Javier, 1995; Schwanberg, 2010). In a similar vein, healthy individuals often report their first language to be the "language of the heart," in which affect is expressed and perceived with greater intensity (Dewaele, 2006, 2010; Pavlenko, 2005, 2006). Recent behavioral and psychophysiological studies, however, have provided inconsistent evidence for differential affective experience between the first and second language (Altarriba & Basnight-Brown, 2011; Conrad, Recio, & Jacobs, 2011; Eilola, Havelka, & Sharma, 2007; Ferré, Sánchez-Casas, & Fraga, 2013; Jończyk, 2015; Opitz & Degner, 2012; Ponari et al., 2015; Sutton, Altarriba, Gianico, & Basnight-Brown, 2007; Wu & Thierry, 2012). In an event-related potential (ERP) study, for instance, Opitz and Degner ( 2012) reported more pronounced early posterior negativity (EPN) amplitudes for emotional compared to neutral words in both the languages of bilinguals. The only difference was observed in the onset of the effect, with the EPN occurring later in L2. The authors suggested that emotional words in L2 might be processed less automatically. In contrast, Wu and Thierry ( 2012) reported that Chinese-English bilinguals fail to access the translation equivalent in Chinese of negatively valenced English words, or at the very least, that lexico-semantic access to the native language is hindered by negative words presented in L2, whereas positive and neutral words leave native lexico-semantic access intact. This result stands in contrast to previous evidence of implicit and unconscious access to translation equivalents in the native language upon reading or hearing words in English (Thierry & Wu, 2007; Wu & Thierry, 2010) and was tentatively interpreted as blocking of access to potentially harmful information by the bilingual brain (Wu & Thierry, 2012).

To the best of our knowledge, the investigation of electrophysiological correlates of affective language processing in context has so far received no attention in bilingual research, with relatively few studies addressing this issue in monolingual research (Bayer, Sommer, & Schacht, 2010; De Pascalis, Arwari, D'Antuono, & Cacace, 2009; Holt, Lynn, & Kuperberg, 2009; Martín-Loeches et al., 2012; Moreno & Vázquez, 2011; Rohr & Abdel Rahman, 2015). Studying language-affect interactions in richer contextual embedding (i.e., within sentences) could bring us closer to the conditions in which affective language is experienced by bilingual individuals in everyday life and perhaps help resolve inconsistencies in the literature. Implementing natural sentence context in research of affective language will thus provide a more faithful picture of affective interactions, resolve potential ambiguities in the meaning of decontextualized affective stimuli, and possibly enhance affective response to these stimuli (Rohr & Abdel Rahman, 2015).

Here, we investigated the electrophysiological and behavioral correlates of contextual affective language processing in 19 late fluent Polish-English bilinguals living in the UK. While undergoing electrophysiological recording, participants read Polish and English sentences that ended in either a congruent or incongruent affective adjective and indicated upon reading the last word whether or not each sentence made sense. Our analyses focused on the N400, a negative-going wave whose latency ranges between 200-600 ms poststimulus onset, peaking at around 400 ms over centro-parietal regions of the scalp. The N400 is known to index semantic integration difficulty (i.e., the cognitive effort required to integrate the meaning of individual words within the context of a sentence; Brown & Hagoort, 1993; Kutas & Federmeier, 2000, 2011; Kutas & Hillyard, 1980; Kutas, Lindamood, & Hillyard, 1984). Previous electrophysiological studies revealed qualitative differences in the way bilinguals processed sentences in their two languages (Elston-Güttler & Friederici, 2007; FitzPatrick & Indefrey, 2014; Frenck-Mestre, 2002; Hahne, 2001; Martin et al., 2013; Moreno & Kutas, 2005; Thierry & Wu, 2007). For instance, Martin et al. ( 2013) demonstrated that late fluent Spanish-English bilinguals reading sentences in their L2 English did not show an N400 incongruity effect for unexpected articles preceding sentence-final target nouns. The researchers concluded that fluent L2 readers might not anticipate the semantic resolution of sentences in the same way as native readers. Note that the overall N400 amplitude reported in the study, however, was more enhanced for L2 rather than L1 sentences. In a different study, Moreno and Kutas ( 2005) found similar N400 incongruity effect elicited by anomalous sentences in the L1 and L2 of Spanish-English bilinguals. The onset of the effect, however, was significantly delayed in the less proficient language of Spanish-dominant and English-dominant Spanish-English bilinguals. In the same vein as Martin et al. ( 2013), the overall N400 amplitude was greater for sentences in L2 than in L1. These findings contribute to the growing body of literature suggesting that the N400 effect might be qualitatively different in the two languages of bilingual individuals, with factors such as language proficiency, or age of L2 acquisition modulating the N400 wave (e.g., Ardal, Donald, Meuter, Muldrew, & Luce, 1990; Weber-Fox & Neville, 1996).

Critically, the N400 amplitude was also shown to be modulated by affective valence (De Pascalis et al., 2009; Herbert, Junghofer, & Kissler, 2008; Herbert, Pauli, & Herbert, 2011; Holt et al., 2009; Moreno & Vázquez, 2011; Wu & Thierry, 2012). For instance, De Pascalis et al. ( 2009) found more enhanced N400 amplitudes to negative compared to positive and neutral words embedded in sentences in monolingual participants. This effect was further modulated as a factor of participants' impulsivity, whereby high-impulsive individuals displayed more pronounced N400 amplitudes to negative sentences than did low-impulsive individuals. Note, however, that the study did not dissociate between the effects of affective valence and semantic congruity. Therefore, the reported N400 effect might have been driven by semantic integration difficulty. This limitation was addressed by Moreno and Vázquez ( 2011), who found increased N400 amplitudes to positive compared to negative target words embedded in highly constraining positively biased and negatively biased sentence frames, respectively. The authors interpreted this effect as reflecting easier semantic integration for negative rather than positive sentences.

To our knowledge, our study is the first to test for a modulation of electrophysiological responses by affective valence during semantic integration in bilinguals. Based on existing research, we hypothesized that N400 amplitudes might be increased and/or delayed for sentences read in English as compared to those read in Polish in Polish-English bilinguals (Ardal et al., 1990; Martin et al., 2013; Moreno & Kutas, 2005). Critically, if affective processing were to be influenced by the language of input, we would expect an interaction between affective valence and presentation language during semantic access. Given the high levels of semantic and affective anticipation afforded by affective contextual information, the effect might unfold in the initial, early stages of semantic processing.

Method

Participants

Twenty-one native English speakers and 19 Polish-English bilinguals gave informed consent to take part in the study that was approved by the ethics committee of Bangor University, Wales, UK. All participants were right-handed and reported normal or corrected-to-normal vision. The bilingual group consisted of late immersed bilinguals currently residing in the UK. They reported using both Polish and English on an everyday basis, in both formal and informal contexts. The global proficiency rating for the two languages was established on the basis of self-reported reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. Language history for the bilingual population was collected using the Language History Questionnaire (LHQ) 2.0 (Li, Zhang, Tsai, & Puls, 2014). Table presents participants' sociobiographical and linguistic information.

Table 1

Stimuli

Thirty-five positive and 35 negative adjectives were embedded in a sentence-final position of 140 constraining sentence frames, of three types: positive ( n = 35), negative ( n = 35), and neutral ( n = 70). Sentences were further divided into four categories: (a) positive sentences ending in a congruent or incongruent word, both from a semantic and affective point of view (e.g., Their honeymoon in the gorgeous scenery of Paris was so/); (b) negative sentences ending in a congruent or incongruent word (e.g., Gloria accidentally poured boiling water over herself and was/); (c) neutral sentences ending in a congruent positive or incongruent negative word (e.g., Women find him interesting, because Harry is very/); and (d) neutral sentences ending in a congruent negative or incongruent positive word (e.g., Jerry spent a whole day in the sun and now his skin is/). In total, there were 140 congruent and 140 incongruent sentences whose length ranged from 8 to 15 words ( M = 10.97, SEM = .13). Prior to the experiment, 42 individuals rated the predictability of all target adjectives on a scale from 1 ( unpredictable) to 7 ( certain). Congruent adjectives were rated as highly predictable (positive sentences: M = 5.54, SEM = .068; negative sentences: M = 5.50, SEM = .076) and incongruent adjectives were rated as rather unpredictable (positive sentences: M = 1.67, SEM = .064; negative sentences: M = 1.62, SEM = .066). Critically, positive and negative sentence endings were equally predictable, t(69) < 1. Neutral sentences were used as fillers and were not controlled for affective valence.

The mean valence and arousal ratings for the English stimuli were obtained from Warriner, Kuperman, and Brysbaert ( 2013). Positive target words ( M = 7.42, SEM = .10) and negative target words ( M = 2.47, SEM = .10) differed significantly in affective valence, F(1, 68) = 1125.46, p < .001, but not in arousal, F(1, 68) = .04, p = .842. We also collected ratings of affective valence for Polish and English target adjectives from our participants in a postexperimental norming study (see Procedure section) to increase stimuli reliability. Finally, we checked for potential differences in lexical frequency (positive: M = 4.27, SEM = .74; negative: M = 4.18, SEM = .69) and word length (positive: M = 7.85, SEM = .27; negative: M = 7.94, SEM = .29) between conditions by means of a one-way ANOVA and found no significant differences, frequency: F(1, 69) = 2.874, p = .095; word length: F(1, 69) = .377, p = .541. Lexical frequency ratings for English stimuli were obtained from SUBTLEX-UK (van Heuven, Mandera, Keuleers, & Brysbaert, 2014). Since at the time of designing the study there was no equivalent lexical frequency corpus for Polish words, we assumed rough similarity in lexical frequency measures between languages.

Procedure

Participants were seated 100 cm away from a CRT monitor in a dimly lit and quiet room. They were asked to read sentences and to decide whether or not each one made sense upon reading the final word by pressing buttons on a response box. Expected endings were indicated by pressing a button with the nondominant hand (left). After a short practice run in the presence of the experimenter, participants completed two blocks of trials in English (monolinguals), or two blocks in English and two in Polish (bilinguals), the language of the first block being counterbalanced between Polish participants. A native Polish and a native English researcher were present at all times, enabling a short exchange in the language of the forthcoming block after each pause. Each block consisted of 70 sentences (35 congruent and 35 incongruent), and the same sentence was never repeated in the same language throughout the experiment. Participants first read the initial part of the sentence (a short phrase) and pressed a button to trigger the delivery of the second part in which words were presented one at a time until the end (target adjective). Each word of the second part was displayed for 200 ms in the center of the screen with an interstimulus interval (ISI) of 500 ms. The target adjective remained on the screen until participant response, but no longer than 2,000 ms, and it was preceded by a randomized interstimulus interval ranging between 350 and 700 ms in steps of 50 ms.

After the experiment, participants were asked to provide ratings of affective valence (1 = extremely negative, 7 = extremely positive) for Polish and English target adjectives that appeared in the experiment. Upon completion, they were debriefed and compensated for their time with £12 or five course credits. Postexperimental affective valence ratings are presented in Table .

Table 2

ERP recording

Electrophysiological data were continuously recorded in reference to electrode Cz at a rate of 1 kHz from 64Ag/AgCl electrodes placed according to the extended 10-20 convention. Two additional electrodes were attached above and below the right eye to monitor and record ocular activity (eye blinks, vertical and horizontal eye movements). Impedances were kept <5 kΩ. EEG signals were amplified with Neuroscan SynAmps2 amplifier unit (El Paso, TX) and filtered online with a band pass filter between 0.1 and 200 Hz. Preprocessing steps and analyses were performed using MATLAB (R2012b, The Mathworks, Inc.) and a combination of scripts and routines implemented in the EEGLAB (v.13.3.2; Delorme & Makeig, 2004) and ERPLAB (v.4.0.2.3; Lopez-Calderon & Luck, 2014) toolboxes. Each dataset was down-sampled to 500 Hz and filtered offline with a 30 Hz low pass noncausal IIR Butterworth digital filter. Epochs ranging from -100 to 1,000 ms after the onset of the target word were extracted from the continuous, filtered EEG recording and subjected to visual inspection. Epochs with excessive muscular artifacts were manually rejected. Subsequently, an independent component analysis (ICA) was performed to extract and dismiss remaining ocular and muscular artifacts, following guidelines by Jung et al. ( 2000). No more than four independent components (ICs) were removed per participant. Finally, all epochs with activity exceeding ±75  μ V at any electrode site were automatically removed using a peak-to-peak moving window. The mean number of ICs removed and accepted epochs is summarized in Table . Baseline correction was performed relative to prestimulus activity, and individual averages were digitally rereferenced to the average of all scalp electrodes (global average reference).

Table 3

ERP data analysis

We focused on the analysis of three ERP components: P1 and N1, to check for early effects of word affective valence, and N400, previously reported to be modulated by congruity, language, and/or affective valence (Kutas & Federmeier, 2000, 2011; Martin et al., 2013; Moreno & Vázquez, 2011; Wu & Thierry, 2012). The ERP components were therefore analyzed in the following predicted time windows and topographies: The P1 was analyzed over six electrodes (O1, O2, PO3, PO4, PO7, PO8) between 100 and 130 ms after final word onset (Thierry, Athanasopoulos, Wiggett, Dering, & Kuipers, 2009). The N1 component was analyzed over four electrodes (PO7, PO8, PO9, PO10) between 180 and 230 ms (Martin, Dering, Thomas, & Thierry, 2009). The N400 was analyzed over 10 electrodes (CP1, CP2, CPZ, C1, C2, Cz, FC1, FC2, FCz, Fz) between 280 and 550 ms (Kutas & Federmeier, 2000; Moreno & Kutas, 2005). Following visual inspection of the ERPs a component resembling a late positive complex (LPC) (Citron, 2012; Kissler, Assadollahi, & Herbert, 2006; Schacht & Sommer, 2009) was also analyzed exploratorily in the 600-800 ms time window on the 10 electrodes selected for N400 analysis (CP1, CP2, CPZ, C1, C2, Cz, FC1, FC2, FCz, Fz).

Statistical analyses were conducted within each participant group by means of repeated-measures ANOVAs with mean amplitudes as dependent variables and congruity (congruent, incongruent), affective valence (positive, negative) and language (English, Polish) as independent variables. A Greenhouse-Geisser correction was applied where appropriate and p values obtained from post hoc pairwise comparisons were adjusted using the Bonferroni correction. The data from two monolingual participants were excluded from the analysis due to excessive alpha rhythm contamination.

Behavioral data analysis

A 2 (congruent, incongruent) × 2 (positive, negative) × 2 (English, Polish) repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted on reaction times (RTs) and error rates, with congruity, valence, and language as within-subject independent variables. The p values obtained from post hoc pairwise comparisons were adjusted using the Bonferroni correction.

Results

Behavioral results

Monolingual group

The ANOVA revealed a main effect of congruity, F(1, 20) = 5.870, MSE = 9831.79, p = .025, η ² = .22, whereby RTs were shorter for congruent ( M = 850.61 ms, SEM = 30.10) than incongruent ( M = 910.49 ms, SEM = 36.68) sentences. There was also an interaction between congruity and valence, F(1, 20) = 18.431, MSE = 3,939.40, p = .000, η ² = .48. Post hoc pairwise comparisons showed that it took longer for participants to judge that a sentence was congruent when it was negative ( M = 883.11 ms, SEM = 31.31) as compared to positive ( M = 818.11 ms, SEM = 33.07; p = .004). The reverse was observed for incongruent sentences where participants took more time to evaluate positive ( M = 935.07 ms, SEM = 38.45) than negative content ( M = 885.91 ms, SEM = 35.86; p = .001).

Error rates were modulated by an interaction between congruity and valence, F(1, 20) = 8.832, MSE = 43.67, p = .008, η ² = .30, such that participants were less accurate in judging a negative sentence as congruent ( M = 12.51 %, SEM = 2.29) than a positive one ( M = 7.75 %, SEM = 1.16; p = .026). In the incongruent condition, by contrast, positive sentences ( M = 13.87 %; SEM = 3.43) were identified with marginally worse accuracy compared to negative sentences ( M = 10.06 %, SEM = 2.13, p = .057).

Bilingual group

There was a main effect of congruity, F(1, 18) = 41.331, MSE = 11710.68, p = .000, η ² = .69, showing that RTs were faster to congruent ( M = 826.56 ms, SEM = 29.24) than incongruent ( M = 939.42 ms, SEM = 33.50) endings. There was also a main effect of valence, F(1, 18) = 13.068, MSE = 4,232.41, p = .002, η ² = .42, such that positive sentences elicited faster RTs ( M = 863.91 ms, SEM = 28.96) than negative ones ( M = 902.06 ms, SEM = 32.62). Crucially, our analyses revealed a significant 3-way interaction between congruity, valence and language, F(1, 18) = 7.021, MSE = 1,887.01, p = .016, η ² = .28. Post hoc comparisons showed that RTs were longer for congruent negative sentences in English ( M = 867.54 ms, SEM = 48.13) and Polish ( M = 860.48 ms, SEM = 36.06) relative to positive sentences both in English ( M = 786.56 ms, SEM = 39.16; p = .001) and Polish ( M = 791.65 ms, SEM = 34.29; p = .001). In the incongruent condition, no difference was observed between conditions ( p s > .05).

There was also an interaction between congruity and valence on error rates, F(1, 18) = 6.948, MSE = 61.23, p = .017, η ² = .27, such that participants made significantly more errors for congruent negative ( M = 14.06 %, SEM = 2.57) than positive ( M = 9.62 %, SEM = 2.02; p = .031) sentences. Figure presents behavioral results for both participant groups.

Electrophysiological results

Monolingual group

As expected, we found a significant main effect of congruity on the N400, F(1, 18) = 13.571, MSE = 1.06, p = .002, η ² = .43, such that amplitudes were increased for incongruent ( M = .814, SEM = .47) relative to congruent ( M = 1.688, SEM = .46) sentences. Valence did not modulate N400 amplitudes overall ( p > .05). Valence and congruity interacted in the LPC range between 600 and 800 ms, F(1, 18) = 4.777, MSE = .95, p = .042, η ² = .21. Post hoc comparisons showed more pronounced LPC amplitudes to congruent negative ( M = 3.038, SEM = .49) compared to incongruent negative ( M = 2.329, SEM = .45) sentences. Other comparisons did not reach significance. Also, no significant P1 or N1 amplitude differences were found across conditions.

Bilingual group

N400 amplitude was modulated by congruity, F(1, 18) = 15.849, MSE = .63, p = .001, η ² = .47; see Figure , with more negative amplitudes in response to incongruent ( M = .847, SEM = .34) compared to congruent ( M = 1.360, SEM = .30) sentences. Language of presentation also modulated the N400 amplitude, F(1, 18) = 5.843, MSE = 1.67, p = .026, η ² = .25, so that the N400 elicited by Polish sentences ( M = .850, SEM = .33) was enhanced compared to English sentences ( M = 1.357, SEM = .33). Critically, language and valence interacted in the N400 window, F(1, 18) = 7.403, MSE = .32, p = .014, η ² = .29; see Figure . Post hoc pairwise comparisons revealed that N400 amplitudes to negative sentences in English were significantly attenuated ( M = 1.530, SEM = .35) compared to negative sentences in Polish ( M = .773, SEM = .33; p = .002).

Furthermore, N400 amplitudes to negative English sentences were more attenuated compared to positive English sentences ( M = 1.183, SEM = .32; p = .021). We found no other significant effect in this time window. Note that the language × valence interaction was unlikely to be artefactually driven by semantic incongruity, given the absence of a valence × congruity interaction ( p = .870).

The language × valence interaction was also found in the analysis of the LPC, F(1, 18) = 8.007, MSE = .72, p = .011, η ² = .30; see Figure . Follow-up pairwise comparisons revealed that positive Polish sentences ( M = 3.091, SEM = .42) elicited enhanced LPC amplitudes as compared to negative ones ( M = 2.552, SEM = .40; p = .005). Also, we found more pronounced LPC amplitudes for negative English sentences ( M = 3.363, SEM = .39) than negative Polish sentences ( p = .024). No other effects were found in this time window. We found no significant P1 or N1 amplitude differences between any of the conditions. Waveforms illustrating responses to congruent and incongruent sentences at 30 electrode sites are available as supplementary material at https://osf.io/63etx/.

Discussion

The present study investigated how Polish-English bilinguals immersed in a second language environment process the affective content of sentences. We expected to observe (a) greater semantic integration difficulty in the second language, as indexed by N400 amplitudes (Elston-Güttler & Friederici, 2007; FitzPatrick & Indefrey, 2014; Frenck-Mestre, 2002; Hahne, 2001; Martin et al., 2013; Moreno & Kutas, 2005; Thierry & Wu, 2007), and (b) differential N400 modulation by affective valence (e.g., Holt et al., 2009; Moreno & Vázquez, 2011; Wu & Thierry, 2012) in the first and the second language (given the use of naturalistic sentences more prone to evoking an affective response) as reflected by an interaction between valence and language.

Consistent with our critical hypothesis, we found a robust, differential N400 modulation by affective valence in L1 and L2 starting as early as 280 ms poststimulus onset, with negative English sentences eliciting reduced N400 amplitudes relative to (a) positive English sentences, (b) positive Polish sentences, and (c) negative Polish sentences, an effect independent of that of semantic congruity. Taking the view that the human brain anticipates both the semantic and the affective resolution of a sentence (Barrett & Bar, 2009; Martin et al., 2013; Martin, Garcia, Breton, Thierry, & Costa, 2014; Moreno & Vázquez, 2011; Van Berkum, Holleman, Nieuwland, Otten, & Murre, 2009; Wager et al., 2008), our finding suggests that semantic access to negative words presented in the second language of bilinguals may be incomplete and suppressed at an early stage of processing-that is, early in the course of semantic integration. This finding is consistent with the hypothetical mechanism of repression proposed for single words by Wu and Thierry ( 2012).

Using an implicit translation-priming paradigm, Wu and Thierry ( 2012) found that fluent Chinese-English bilinguals failed to display language unconscious nonselective lexical access from English to Chinese when the prime of a word pair presented in English had a negative valence, whereas the expected level of priming was found for word pairs primed by a positive or a neutral word. Consistent with Wu and Thierry's ( 2012) results, also, we found no manifestation of the valence effect in the behavioral results.

Here, we extend the finding to semantic information presented in a sentence context and in a different language pair. We believe that the predictive context afforded by a more natural sentential context increased the demands on the semantic system and thus made it more likely to observe a direct affective modulation of semantic integration. However, we found an unexpected modulation of the N400 in the opposite direction that was expected. In addition, we observed a differential ERP modulation by affective valence in L1 and L2 also between 600 and 800 ms poststimulus onset (i.e., in the LPC range, known to index semantic reevaluation and reallocation of attention to affective stimuli; Citron, 2012; Kissler et al., 2006). Interestingly, the LPC showed the reverse pattern of that found for the N400, with negative sentences eliciting reduced LPC amplitude in L1 as compared to L2 and compared to positive sentences in L1. This might suggest that even though semantic access was unconstrained in the native language, reevaluation and reanalysis were differentially inhibited at a later stage. This mirror effect makes sense if one considers that affective information suppressed early on requires more processing at a reevaluation stage. Alternatively, it might be that, having fully appreciated the unpleasant nature of the negative sentence completion in L1, the brain fails to engage in reevaluation to the same extent as it does for positive and L2 words. Future studies are needed to validate this interpretation, however.

Our interpretation might be seen as one that departs from the way N400 effects have been typically interpreted in the literature (i.e., N400 amplitude indexing the difficulty of semantic integration; see Brown & Hagoort, 1993; Kutas & Federmeier 2011). However, based on classical findings from the L2 literature, one would have expected greater N400 amplitudes for L2 stimuli (Martin et al., 2013; Moreno & Kutas, 2005; Thierry & Wu, 2007). Thus we chose to interpret this effect as a sign of shallower processing in the case of L2, as has been shown for instance by Chwilla, Brown, and Hagoort ( 1995); Bentin, Kutas, and Hillyard ( 1993); or Hahne and Friederici ( 2002).

Together, our electrophysiological data offer new evidence consistent with the repression mechanism proposed by Wu and Thierry ( 2012), who used single emotional words in L2: the similar N400 amplitudes elicited by negative and positive sentence-final words in L1 suggest that semantic access is unconstrained for negative L1 words presented within a natural and affective sentence context, while the LPC results may suggest that the reevaluation and reanalysis is reduced for these same negative words, possibly indexing a late-stage protection mechanism after coping with earlier semantic access. By contrast, and in line with Wu and Thierry ( 2012), semantic access appears suppressed for L2 negative words and, thus, greater amplitudes in the LPC range because, having been processed more shallowly in earlier phases, these words would require more reevaluation.

We believe that these observations were made possible largely due to the implementation of an affective sentential context in our design that fosters anticipation and thus enhances interactions between affective and cognitive processing. Indeed, the human brain is highly predictive and constantly monitors situation development to act as fast as possible (Bar, 2007; Clark, 2013; Lupyan & Clark, 2015, Van Berkum, 2010). Consistent with this view, our results demonstrate that individuals not only predict how a sentence unfolds at a purely semantic level but also create specific expectations regarding its anticipated affective content (Moreno & Vázquez, 2011). We thus argue in favor of the implementation of a sentential context in the study of affective language processing because it likely enables subtle processing interactions between affective and semantic meaning that can hardly be uncovered by other means (Hinojosa, Carretié, Valcárcel, Méndez-Bértolo, & Pozo, 2009; Wu, Athanassiou, Dorjee, Roberts, & Thierry, 2012). Thus, in the present study, a negative sentence context would enable the anticipation of a negative final word with a potentially adverse effect, which would have reduced semantic access efficiency in the early stages of L2 processing and blocked the reevaluation of negative information in L1 at later, more explicit stages of processing.

Wu and Thierry ( 2012) speculated that a repression mechanism of lexico-semantic access may be underpinned by an interaction between the limbic system and the caudate nucleus, which is known to play a key role in bilingual language control (Abutalebi & Green, 2007; Ali, Green, Kherif, Devlin, & Price, 2010). Considering that our study used sentences, the richer contextual embedding likely leads to a greater involvement of the limbic system than in the case of single words presented out of context. Thus, if Wu and Thierry's hypothesis is correct, we expect our more naturalistic paradigm to induce negative meaning suppression to a greater extent or sooner in the course of stimulus processing, leading to early modulations of the N400. Although the exact nature of the suppression mechanism for negative information in the second language is not yet established, it may provide a neurocognitive interpretational framework for findings from the clinical (Aragno & Schlachet, 1996; Burbridge et al., 2005; Dewaele & Costa, 2013) and introspective (Pavlenko, 2005, 2006) studies. Specifically, suppressed early access to negative information presented in the second language and subsequently inhibited reevaluation of negative meaning in the first language might explain why bilingual speakers find it easier to talk about traumatic events from the past in their nonnative language and/or subjectively describe their second language as emotionally detached. To date, however, most behavioral and psychophysiological experiments have failed to replicate findings reported in introspective studies (Eilola et al., 2007; Ferré et al., 2013; Jończyk, 2015; Ponari et al., 2015; Sutton et al., 2007), with essentially no measurable differences in affect processing between first and second languages. Through the implementation of natural sentential context in our paradigm, we were able to observe, for the first time, robust and dynamic differences in the processing of affective content between the L1 and L2 of Polish-English bilinguals.

Beyond the question of interactions between affect and language, we believe our results inform domains such as decision making, known to be under the influence of affect (Damasio, 2008; Gigerenzer, 2008). Recent studies by Keysar, Hayakawa, and An ( 2012) and Costa, Foucart, Arnon, Aparici, and Apesteguia ( 2014) showed for instance that bilingual speakers presented with a problem in their second language tend to be less affected by the consequences of a loss (i.e., display reduced loss aversion). In other words, they appear to be less affected by the negative consequences of a decision when reasoning is held in a nonnative language. Furthermore, Costa, Foucart, Arnon, et al. ( 2014) reported that bilinguals tend to be more objective and consistent when making decisions in their second language, probably due to greater emotional detachment. In two other studies, Costa, Foucart, Hayakawa, et al. ( 2014) and Geipel, Hadjichristidis, and Surian ( 2015) also reported that being in a nonnative language "mode" might differentially impact moral judgment. For instance, Costa, Foucart, Hayakawa, et al. ( 2014) reported that bilinguals make more utilitarian decisions in the second language (e.g., are more likely to sacrifice one individual to save five lives), possibly as a result of a greater affective detachment in L2. Geipel et al. ( 2015) demonstrated that individuals tended to be more lenient and at the same time less confident when making moral judgments in the nonnative relative to the native language. The authors attributed this effect to a possible inhibition of social and moral norms in L2, and only marginally so to the affective detachment in L2 (Geipel et al., 2015).

Along the same lines, Gao, Zika, Rogers, and Thierry ( 2015) tested whether risk-taking would be modulated by language-based feedback when participants repeatedly chose between playing or leaving (not playing) 50/50 gambles to win small monetary rewards. The choices were presented in numeric form but the outcome was presented using adjectives with positive and negative valence in the participants' first language (Chinese) or second language (English). Gao et al. ( 2015) modeled the effects of presenting feedback indicating good and bad outcome in either Chinese or English upon participants' subsequent decisions to play. Although positive feedback incited participants to play more on the next trial than negative feedback did, they found a striking dissociation between languages such that positive feedback in the native language, Chinese, incited participants to take 10 % more gambles (i.e., more risk) on the next trial as compared to all other conditions. This result converges with the results discussed above, in the sense that operation in a second language context reduces excessive emotional responses leading to increased risk taking in the native language.

In sum, substantial evidence showing deep-rooted interactions between language and nonverbal aspects of cognition is already available. This study extends this field of research to the domain of affective content by showing that bilingual individuals may process negative content more shallowly in L2 than L1.

However, unlike previous studies that reported increased N400 amplitudes for stimuli presented in L2 (Martin et al., 2013; Moreno & Kutas, 2005; Thierry & Wu, 2007), or delayed sentence processing in L2 (Frenck-Mestre, 2002), or difficulties anticipating sentence-final words in L2 (Martin et al., 2013), we found an unexpected modulation of semantic integration by language, with N400 amplitudes overall more negative in L1 than L2. This may be because affective content is generally more salient in the native language, leading to deeper processing indexed by greater N400 amplitude, which, in turn, would have canceled and even overcompensated differences in semantic integration difficulty between the first and second language. Note that, the magnitude of the N400 effect was similar in the Polish-English bilingual and English monolingual group, the only observable difference between the two groups in the N400 range relating to the onset of the N400 congruity effect (i.e., earlier in the monolingual group). This might be due to the possible differences in semantic anticipation in the first and second language, as already demonstrated by Martin et al. ( 2013).

Given the long history of immersion of our bilingual participants in the L2 environment (8 years on average) we predict that the reported effects would be more pronounced in participants who have spent less time in an English-speaking environment, because differences between Polish and English operating context would necessarily be more marked if their English was weaker and/or less contextually reinforced. Future studies may empirically validate this prediction. Ideally, future studies will also compare bilingual groups differing in their degree of L2 proficiency. Furthermore, in this study, neutral context sentences were used as fillers and their number was insufficient to allow meaningful statistical comparisons with affective conditions. Follow-up studies might thus involve investigating differences between affective and neutral sentence contexts and possible interactions with language of operation. Also, it would be interesting to test whether the effect of affective suppression is more robust when bilinguals listen to rather than read natural affective sentences.

Conclusion

This study offers an opportunity to piece together evidence from clinical and introspective studies in bilingualism, emotion, behavioral, and psychophysiological research (see Pavlenko, 2012). Using affectively realistic sentence contexts enabled us to show that access to negative information in the second language may be suppressed in early phases of processing and triggers greater levels of reevaluation in later stages (which need not be effective). By contrast, early semantic access appears unconstrained in L1, and thus requires lesser levels of reevaluation at later stages. Such findings are likely to have significant implications for therapy, education, and everyday life in an increasing multilingual world.

Acknowledgments

We thank Ian FitzPatrick and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on the manuscript

Authors' contribution

R.J., G.T.: designed research

R.J., B.B., K.M., K.H.: collected the data

R.J., B.B., G.T.: analyzed the data

R.J., B.B., G.T.: wrote the paper

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest

We declare no conflict of interest.

Footnotes

¹We also initially hypothesized that the valence-by-language interaction might already be detectable in early stages of lexical access (i.e., within the N2 range; Costa, Strijkers, Martin, & Thierry, 2009; Hoshino & Thierry, 2011) and spread to the N400 time window. This prediction related to the high level of affective and semantic anticipation afforded by the sentential context in the present experiment. Data analysis did reveal the predicted early negativity, but its scalp topography and latency was essentially overlapped with the N400 effect on which the analysis thus focused.

²The stimuli are available as supplementary material at https://osf.io/63etx/.

³ The monolingual group was tested in English only, and therefore the language differentiation did not apply here and in further analyses.

References

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Costa, A., Strijkers, K., Martin, C., & Thierry, G. (2009). The time course of word retrieval revealed by event-related brain potentials during overt speech. [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(50), 21442-21446. doi:10.1073/pnas.0908921106 PMC free article]

Damasio A. Descartes' error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. New York, NY: Random House; 2008.

Dewaele J-M. Expressing anger in multiple languages. In: Pavlenko A, editor. Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression and representation. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters; 2006. pp. 118-151.

Dewaele J-M. Emotions in multiple languages. Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan; 2010.

Frenck-Mestre C. An on-line look at sentence processing in the second language. In: Heredia RR, Altarriba J, editors. Bilingual sentence processing. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North-Holland/Elsevier Science; 2002. pp. 217-236.

Gigerenzer G. Gut feelings: The intelligence of the unconscious. New York, NY: Penguin; 2008.

Grosjean F. Life with two languages: An introduction to bilingualism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1984.

Grosjean F. Bilingual: Life and reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 2010.

Hoshino, N., & Thierry, G. (2011). Language selection in bilingual word production: electrophysiological evidence for cross-language competition. Brain Research, 1371, 100-109. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2010.11.053

Kutas, M., Lindamood, T., & Hillyard, S. A. (1984). Word expectancy and event-related brain potentials during sentence processing. Preparatory States and Processes, 217-237.

Lopez-Calderon, J., & Luck, S. J. (2014). ERPLAB: An open-source toolbox for the analysis of event-related potentials. [Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8. Doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00213 PMC free article]

Pavlenko A. Emotions and multilingualism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press; 2005.

Pavlenko A. Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression and representation. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters; 2006.

Wager, T. D., Barrett, L. F., Bliss-Moreau, E., Lindquist, K., Duncan, S., Kober, H., . . . Mize, J. (2008). The neuroimaging of emotion. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. Feldman Barrett (Eds.), The handbook of emotion (3rd ed., Vol. 3, pp. 249-271). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

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The bilingual brain turns a blind eye to negative statements in the second language

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Neurobilingualism research has failed to reveal significant language differences in the processing of affective content. However, the evidence to date derives mostly from studies in which affective stimuli are presented out of context, which is unnatural and fails to capture the complexity of everyday sentence-based communication.

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Creating bilingual minds | Naja Ferjan Ramirez | TEDxLjubljana

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The Benefits of Being Bilingual - Univision Noticias

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Being bilingual can drastically alter your life... and we don't just mean being able to order from a menu when visiting a foreign country! Trace has the details. DNews is a show about the science of everyday life. We post two new videos every day of the week.

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The benefits of a bilingual brain - Mia Nacamulli

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Lunes, 23 de Enero de 2017 - Actualizado a las 06:03h

bilbao - Existe una estrecha relación entre la lengua y el contexto de su aprendizaje que hace que las mismas emociones varíen en función del idioma en el que habla un bilingüe, según sostiene el investigador del Basque Center On Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) Jon Andoni Duñabeitia.

Pese a que hasta ahora "no se ha tenido en cuenta", el poder "sentir emoción" en otro idioma parece ser "un factor determinante" a la hora de marcar el nivel de bilingüismo, ya que "depende del conocimiento y contacto" de la persona con la lengua en cuestión, y, así, las emociones "cambian radicalmente" en función de si la comunicación se produce en un idioma materno o en otro extranjero.

Mientras que las lenguas nativas se adquieren en los primeros años en contextos familiares "cargados de emociones", las foráneas se aprenden generalmente en entornos académicos o profesionales, por lo que se produce con ellas un "distanciamiento emocional" que hace que uno "sienta" diferente, por ejemplo, "un insulto o un chiste", ya que "no es lo mismo aprender de memoria, que aprender viviendo, pues una vez que se vive también se siente", explica.

Como nativo castellano, "un chiste me hará menos gracia y un insulto me dolerá menos en inglés. Por mucho que lo entienda perfectamente, mi cuerpo y cerebro reaccionan diferente", ejemplifica Duñabeitia.

El bilingüismo, que fue considerado históricamente "nada menos que un tipo de esquizofrenia" al pensarse que un individuo poseía así dos almas, aún hoy encuentra "armas arrojadizas a favor y en contra", cuando desde la ciencia, en cambio, la realidad es "mucho más neutra", afirma el experto en neurociencia cognitiva del lenguaje.

Pese a que los bilingües tienen "la flexibilidad cognitiva un poco más desarrollada", lo que les permitiría "gestionar las lenguas mejor" al estar habituados a ello, "pasan por los mismos hitos de desarrollo cognitivo" que los monolingües, y no se ha demostrado que posean "ventajas" en otros dominios cognitivos más allá de la lengua, al menos de manera generalizada.

Las virtudes cognitivas que se enuncian con respecto a las personas bilingües son múltiples, pues "es más fácil y atractivo contar al mundo una diferencia que algo que no difiere", si bien la adquisición de una nueva lengua "no altera de una manera drástica y global la estructura del sistema cerebral", y el control ejecutivo "es idéntico en monolingües y bilingües, ya sean niños, jóvenes, adultos o ancianos", subraya Duñabeitia.

Aunque "a nivel descriptivo" se haya podido encontrar "alguna pequeña diferencia anatómica" entre ambos, especialmente cuando los estudios se circunscriben "a grupos grandes y con edades concretas", dichas desemejanzas no vienen acompañadas de "ninguna ventaja en la conducta de las personas", y a nivel de atención, bilingües y monolingües "se comportan exactamente igual", insiste.

De esta manera, las conclusiones "no son generales ni replicables", y podrían deberse a "otras variables", como el "estatus socioeconómico", que, "aunque poco tenido en cuenta en la literatura científica sobre bilingüismo, moldea nuestra capacidad cognitiva", apunta el investigador.

"No hay ni que forzar el bilingüismo ni quitarle mérito", sentencia Duñabeitia, quien enmarca el ser bilingüe en la capacidad de comunicarse "razonablemente" en otra lengua, para indicar después que aún a los 70 años es posible serlo, como demuestran recientes estudios de su equipo en los que las personas mayores aprenden nuevas lenguas.

Y es que la principal ventaja del bilingüe no es a nivel cerebral, sino "a nivel sociolingüístico". No obstante, en este sentido recuerda que "las escuelas y centros educativos, en muchos casos, son empresas", e insta a "no olvidar el fin comunicativo y la utilidad de la lengua", al tiempo que no deja de cuestionarse si "aprender más lenguas nos hace mejores". - Efe

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Las emociones varían según el idioma que use el bilingüe

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Lunes, 23 de Enero de 2017 - Actualizado a las 06:03h bilbao - Existe una estrecha relación entre la lengua y el contexto de su aprendizaje que hace que las mismas emociones varíen en función del idioma en el que habla un bilingüe, según sostiene el investigador del Basque Center On Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) Jon Andoni Duñabeitia.

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Working in your native language has obvious benefits - words come naturally, mistakes are rarely made in grammar, syntax or tense and, let's face it, it's easy.

But what about speaking and thinking in another language? What happens then and how does it affect your personality and decision making?

Thinking in Another Language: More Interesting Than you Think

Communicating in a foreign language has its benefits and drawbacks. For example, speaking another language introduces grammar and other structural mistakes a native speaker would not make. It may also seem sterile and unengaged, especially if the speaker has not spent a lot of time in an environment where their new language is in everyday use.
Speaking a Foreign Language
Non-native speakers may also forget words they don't use very often and may not have learnt more than one way to discuss a particular topic. These difficulties are often magnified when the speaker is very tired or under a lot of stress.

On the other hand, they are likely to use simple words and a straightforward delivery style. Although undoubtedly accented, their foreign accent is much more likely to come from their mother tongue rather than an obscure or difficult to understand region.

Interestingly, recent studies have shown that people are also more logical when speaking in a foreign language, especially when tasked to solve problems. According to a recent expat article, decision-making skills can differ depending on which language is being used.

When speaking in Spanish, emotional factors were more prevalent in the decision making process for the Spanish group while when speaking English their decision making was more rational, logical and less emotional.

Language and Decision Making
Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona has studied a number of native Spanish speakers and compared their decision-making skills in Spanish and again in a foreign language, English. The study concluded that emotional factors were more prevalent in the decision-making process when the participants were using Spanish. They also showed a tendency to regard risk and certainty differently.

When making decisions whilst using English, the study showed the participants to be more rational, logical and less emotional. Measurable differences were found in their attitude to avoid loss during the decision-making process.
Making Decisions with Emotion
The article also cites a study previously undertaken by the University of Chicago, which also found that decision making is less emotionally biased when conducted in a foreign language rather than in the participant's native language. The authors of this study were quoted as observing: 'these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does'.

Decision making is less emotionally biased when conducted in a foreign language

Something to Think about when Making Important Decisions
Although fluency and comfort in a foreign language are of paramount importance, organisations might wish to take note of which language could be most effective in certain difficult situations, perhaps beginning with the decision-making process when faced with complex problems.

This research begs the questions what if all decisions - business, diplomatic or military were taken in English rather than the native language of the participants? Would "better" decisions be made? Would conflicts be avoided? Worth thinking in another language!

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Thinking in Another Language: What Happens and Why?

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Working in your native language has obvious benefits - words come naturally, mistakes are rarely made in grammar, syntax or tense and, let's face it, it's easy. But what about speaking and thinking in another language? What happens then and how does it affect your personality and decision making?

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To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.

A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

"Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?" asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study.

"It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases," wrote Keysar's team.

Psychologists say human reasoning is shaped by two distinct modes of thought: one that's systematic, analytical and cognition-intensive, and another that's fast, unconscious and emotionally charged.

'Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language?'
cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation.
Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.

To investigate these possibilities, Keysar's team developed several tests based on scenarios originally proposed by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who in 2002 won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on prospect theory, which describes how people intuitively perceive risk.

In one famous example, Kahneman showed that, given the hypothetical option of saving 200 out of 600 lives, or taking a chance that would either save all 600 lives or none at all, people prefer to save the 200 - yet when the problem is framed in terms of losing lives, many more people prefer the all-or-nothing chance rather than accept a guaranteed loss of 400 lives.

People are, in a nutshell, instinctively risk-averse when considering gain and risk-taking when faced with loss, even when the essential decision is the same. It's a gut-level human predisposition, and if second-language thinking made people think less systematically, Keysar's team supposed the tendency would be magnified. Conversely, if second-language thinking promoted deliberation, the tendency would be diminished.

The first experiment involved 121 American students who learned Japanese as a second language. Some were presented in English with a hypothetical choice: To fight a disease that would kill 600,000 people, doctors could either develop a medicine that saved 200,000 lives, or a medicine with a 33.3 percent chance of saving 600,000 lives and a 66.6 percent chance of saving no lives at all.

Nearly 80 percent of the students chose the safe option. When the problem was framed in terms of losing rather than saving lives, the safe-option number dropped to 47 percent. When considering the same situation in Japanese, however, the safe-option number hovered around 40 percent, regardless of how choices were framed. The role of instinct appeared reduced.

Two subsequent experiments in which the hypothetical situation involved job loss rather than death, administered to 144 native Korean speakers from Korea's Chung Nam National University and 103 English speakers studying abroad in Paris, found the same pattern of enhanced deliberation. "Using a foreign language diminishes the framing effect," wrote Keysar's team.

The researchers next tested how language affected decisions on matters of direct personal import. According to prospect theory, the possibility of small losses outweigh the promise of larger gains, a phenomenon called myopic risk aversion and rooted in emotional reactions to the idea of loss.

The same group of Korean students was presented with a series of hypothetical low-loss, high-gain bets. When offered bets in Korean, just 57 percent took them. When offered in English, that number rose to 67 percent, again suggesting heightened deliberation in a second language.

To see if the effect held up in real-world betting, Keysar's team recruited 54 University of Chicago students who spoke Spanish as a second language. Each received $15 in $1 bills, each of which could be kept or bet on a coin toss. If they lost a toss, they'd lose the dollar, but winning returned the dollar and another $1.50 - a proposition that, over multiple bets, would likely be profitable.

When the proceedings were conducted in English, just 54 percent of students took the bets, a number that rose to 71 percent when betting in Spanish. "They take more bets in a foreign language because they expect to gain in the long run, and are less affected by the typically exaggerated aversion to losses," wrote Keysar and colleagues.

The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.

"Given that more and more people use a foreign language on a daily basis, our discovery could have far-reaching implications," they wrote, suggesting that people who speak a second language might use it when considering financial decisions. "Over a long time horizon, this might very well be beneficial."
Image: David Pursehouse/Flickr Citation: "The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases." By Boaz Keysar, Sayuri L. Hayakawa and Sun Gyu An. Psychological Science, published online 18 April 2012.

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Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational

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To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language: A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

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The topic editors, Cornelia Herbert and colleagues, have noted that language has historically been assumed to be independent from emotions. The historical backdrop to this is the long reign of faculty psychology, which viewed the human mind as composed of discrete abilities (see discussion in Barrett, 2013). The mental modularity popularized by Chomsky ( 1965) and Fodor ( 1983) continued this view following the cognitive revolution of mid-century. Emotion had no role in information processing psychology, leading to its neglect in the cognitive sciences (Cromwell and Panksepp, 2011). Indeed, the classic emotion-cognition divide has been criticized in the past decades by theorists who are otherwise not natural allies (e.g., Damasio, 1994; Cromwell and Panksepp, 2011; Lindquist, 2013). An alternative to faculty psychology is psychological construction (Lindquist, 2013). On this view, mental abilities and mental states like emotions are constructed from the dynamic interaction of physiological states, situation-specific information, and conceptual knowledge.

In the modular view of mind, emotion and language should have little overlap in their processes and representations. However, according to psychological constructivism, an emotional reaction can be influenced by any aspect of the on-going situation, such as the language being spoken, which is the topic of this commentary.

I describe here findings on the emotionality differences between a native and a foreign language. Bilingual speakers frequently report that swearing, praying, lying, and saying I love you feel differently when using a native rather than a foreign language (see, e.g., Pavlenko, 2005; Dewaele, 2010). My goal is to highlight the relevance of this body of work for the theoretical assumptions regarding language-emotion independence.

When and why is a first language more emotional?

An emotionality advantage for native languages has been documented using diverse techniques, as recently discussed in a comprehensive review paper (Pavlenko, 2012). For example, in a European study using a variety of L1-L2 pairings, advertising slogans were judged to be more emotional when the messages were written in the native language rather than respondents' L2 (Puntoni et al., 2009). Anooshian and Hertel ( 1994) found emotion-memory effects for L1 but not L2 words, among Spanish-English bilinguals.

Reduced emotionality in the L2 has also been found in studies that use emotion words to interfere with processing. Colbeck and Bowers ( 2012) compared emotion word processing in native Chinese speakers and native English speakers using an English attentional-blink task. The native English speakers showed a strong blink following a taboo distractor, while Chinese speakers of English as a second language showed a blink that was reduced in size, consistent with being able to more easily ignore the taboo distractor. Other examples of improved performance because of reduced L2 emotionality have been found using decision making tasks. In two studies by different research teams, bilingual speakers made slightly more rational decisions when evaluating vignettes written in a foreign language (Keysar et al., 2012; Costa et al., 2014; see also findings about moral dilemmas, Costa et al., 2014).

Laboratory studies measuring skin conductance amplitudes have corroborated these findings (Harris et al., 2003). An important qualification was obtained by studying early, sequential bilinguals, who learned Spanish first from their parents and English second from peers and schooling in American society (Harris et al., 2006). For these bilinguals, their first language was not their most proficient language. They had similar electrodermal responses for emotional phrases in their two languages. One implication (which needs additional empirical support) is that both early age of acquisition and high proficiency are required to show an emotionality advantage. That is, if only age of acquisition were sufficient to show heightened electodermal responses, then the heritage language learners should have shown stronger emotions to Spanish phrases. If only proficiency mattered, then this group should have shown stronger emotionality responses to L2-English. A comparison group of bilinguals for whom L1-Spanish was both the first learned and most proficient language revealed higher skin conductance responses for childhood reprimands in L1 than in L2. This suggests that L1/L2 emotionality differences are strongest when L1 is the native language and L2 is a less proficient, foreign language.

In addition to early age of acquisition and high proficiency, emotional resonances are stronger when language is learned via immersion, rather than from classroom learning (Dewaele, 2010). Another important factor is high usage frequency (Degner et al., 2011). In the broader literature on L1/L2 effects, these four factors are linked in reciprocal, causal relationships, and indeed, are important for determining individual differences in bilingual experiences and abilities. Early age of acquisition typically results in high proficiency; high proficiency usually leads to frequent use. Frequency of use improves proficiency; immersive learning leads to higher frequency of use and better proficiency.

Note that there have been inconsistences in laboratory tasks of L1/L2 emotionality differences. Several studies have failed to replicate Anooshian and Hertel's emotion-memory effects, with Ferré et al. ( 2010) reporting no recall effects as a function of L1/L2 status (see also Ayçiçegi-Dinn and Caldwell-Harris, 2009). Similar interference was found for L1 and L2 on an emotional Stroop task (Eilola et al., 2007). When Eilola and Havelka ( 2011) recorded skin conductance during a taboo Stroop task, they found similar interference effects of the taboo words in L1/L2, but L1 taboo words nevertheless elicited larger autonomic responses than did L2 taboo words.

Causes: why are emotional resonances strongest when a language is acquired early and learned to high proficiency?

Intuitively, it makes sense that a language learned in childhood will carry strong emotional resonances. The family context of learning means that everyday language carries the full range of human emotions. A mechanism for connecting the physical experience of emotion with specific phrases and words is amygdala-mediated learning. Early language develops at the same time as emotional regulation systems (Bloom and Beckwith, 1989). It is thus plausible that utterances that are learned early become tightly connected with the brain's emotional system. However, second languages can also come to feel emotional, if they are used frequently and are learned via immersion rather than in the classroom (Dewaele, 2010; Degner et al., 2011). This is why I proposed that the primary causal factor is the context in which a language is learned and used (Harris et al., 2006). Words and phrases come to have a distinctive emotional feel by virtue of being learned, or habitually used, in a specific emotional context.

My theoretical proposal is that using a language in emotional contexts provides it with emotional resonances because human experiences are learned and stored in a context-dependent manner. This view is consistent with episodic trace theories of memory (Hintzman, 1986), encoding specificity (Tulving and Thompson, 1973), language-specific autobiographic recall of memory (Marian and Kaushanskaya, 2004, 2008), and psychological constructivism broadly construed (Lindquist, 2013). With context-dependent learning, distributional analysis sorts out, via exposure to many examples, which aspects of the overall meaning most frequently co-occur with specific words and phrases (e.g., McClelland et al., 1986). An alternative view is that frequency of use is what matters rather than contexts of use (e.g., Puntoni et al., 2009; Degner et al., 2011). I suspect the frequency view and the contexts of learning view are actually highly similar perspectives and make different predictions only in rare cases. My reasoning is that frequent usage entails emotional usage. Human social lives, which are mediated by communication, are highly emotional. If there are situations of frequent use of an L2 in low-emotion environment, then my theory predicts that these L2 users will experience their L2 as low in emotional resonances.

One of the strengths of the "emotional contexts of learning" hypothesis is that it accommodates the idiosyncratic learning histories of individual speakers. In a group study on emotional word processing, a word such as snake will elicit different emotional reactions depending on individuals' personalities, experiences with snakes and cultural backgrounds. An implication is that we can have two (complementary) ways of studying L1/L2 emotionality effects. We can take average responses across a group of bilingual speakers, by examining language that most people find emotional, such as parents scolding children (childhood reprimands), peers insulting each other (insults), or people expressing love, praise, appreciation (endearments). When my colleagues and I used these categories of emotional expressions, we thus studied common situations where these phrases are learned and used (Harris et al., 2006). But in these studies, individual experiences that deviate from group trends are ignored and treated as noise.

A second method is to interview people about their idiosyncratic experiences. What specific phrases did your parents say to you? How did authority figures speak to you as a young adult? What did a romantic partner tell you that you appreciated? The prediction is that emotionality will be greater for the language that was used and/or learned in these situations. Although this interview technique has not yet been used, immigration narratives revealed that emotional language varies with individual experiences (Marian and Kaushanskaya, 2008).

Theoretical implication: vocabulary and grammar are not context-independent

To move beyond behaviorists' focus on imitation as the main route to learning, Chomsky ( 1965) and theorists of the mid-20th century emphasized that linguistic expressions are primarily a result of applying abstract rules. They characterized language as a parsimonious symbol system, a type of mental algebra. The language learner had to strip away words' context to construct context-independent vocabulary. Learners must ignore extra-linguistic aspects of sentences in order to construct an abstract grammar.

The Chomskyan theoretical view dove-tailed with the intuition that many people have, which is that words are containers for meanings. Reddy ( 1979) has labeled this the conduit metaphor, referring to the belief that language, phrases and sentences are the containers for speakers' meanings and thoughts. These containers are then sent to conversation partners, who extract and thus possess the meaning. Examples provided by Reddy include the common request to "put your feelings into words."

An inference from the conduit metaphor is that, as long as two phrases are translation equivalents, they should deliver the same meaning. However, "same meaning" is itself open to interpretation. Consider the case where an English native speaker has learned French in a classroom context. When hearing Je t'aime, the phrase doesn't deliver the same emotional punch as I love you (as documented by Dewaele's study of multilingual speakers' report of I love you expressions; see also Caldwell-Harris et al., 2013). If "extracting and possessing the meaning" includes the totality of mental states that form as a reaction to hearing a phrase, then the I love you examples (and other emotionality effects) falsify the conduit metaphor. However, the Chomskyan tradition has generally advocated a narrow view of meaning, confining it to the sense of words, not their richer connotations. If the meaning of words is confined to what is involved in identifying translation equivalents, then the conduit metaphor can be preserved.

One reason to retain the conduit metaphor (and the narrow definition of meaning) is if the conduit metaphor is the only way we have of understanding how symbols convey information. But other conceptions are present in the research literature and in everyday use. Reddy's ( 1979) description of how language actually works to provide meaning is called the toolmaker paradigm. Words and phrases are not containers of meaning, but clues that hearers' use to infer speakers' communicative intent. On this view, Je t'aime doesn't deliver the same emotional punch to the classroom French learner as I love you, because the phrase isn't a container for the feeling expressed by I love you. It's a tool speakers use to guide hearers to an interpretation. In the case of foreign language learners, L2 phrases are imperfect tools for activating the meanings that would automatically be elicited by the same phrase in a native language.

An advantage of discussing the relevance of emotionality differences to the conduit metaphor is that the conduit metaphor and objections to it are a bit abstract. L1-L2 emotionality differences lend concreteness to Reddy's classic critique of the container metaphor.

These arguments in turn have their theoretical implications, including how context is represented. A second theoretical implication of L1/L2 emotionality effects is that words and phrases gain meaning from sensorimotor and emotional embodiment. Both of these are discussed further in Caldwell-Harris ( 2014).

Conclusions

Beyond the theoretical implications, understanding L1/L2 emotionality effects is important for bilinguals who may wonder why these effects exist, or may wonder why these effect don't exist for them. Emotionality effects are relevant for monolingual speakers whenever they interact with bilinguals who are using the language that for them is later-learned or less-proficient. And finally, they are important because they challenge us to confirm, refute, or extend our theories about the relationship between language and emotion.

Conflict of interest statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Footnotes

¹To be as inclusive as possible, I follow the common practice of identifying bilingualism as either having good proficiency in more than one language, or of regularly using more regularly using more than one language, regardless of proficiency. The first language (L1) is defined to be the chronologically first acquired language, with "second language" meaning a language acquired after the L1 (see Dewaele, 2010). A foreign language is a language acquired primarily via classroom learning, and not a language spoken in the learners' community.

References

Caldwell-Harris C. L. (2014). Emotionality Differences Between a Native and Foreign Language: Implications for Context-Dependence and Embodiment. Available at: https://bu.academia.edu/CatherineCaldwellHarris/

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Damasio A. (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. London: Vintage

Dewaele J.-M. (2010). Emotions in Multiple Languages. London: Palgrave Macmillan; 10.1057/9780230289505

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Harris C. L., Gleason J. B., Ayçiçegi A. (2006). When is a first language more emotional? Psychophysiological evidence from bilingual speakers, in Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation. Clevedon, ed Pavlenko A., editor. (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters; ), 257-283

Marian V., Kaushanskaya M. (2008). Words, feelings, and bilingualism: cross-linguistic differences in emotionality of autobiographical memories. Ment. Lex. 3, 72-90 10.1075/ml.3.1.06mar [PMC free article]

McClelland J. L., Rumelhart D. E., Hinton G. E. (1986). The appeal of parallel distributed processing, in Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, Vol. 1, eds Rumelhart D. E., McClelland J. L., editors. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; ), 3-44

Pavlenko A. (2005). Emotions and Multilingualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Reddy M. J. (1979). The conduit metaphor-a case of frame conflict in our language about language, in Metaphor and Thought, ed Ortony A., editor. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; ), 284-297

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Emotionality differences between a native and foreign language: theoretical implications

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The topic editors, Cornelia Herbert and colleagues, have noted that language has historically been assumed to be independent from emotions. The historical backdrop to this is the long reign of faculty psychology, which viewed the human mind as composed of discrete abilities (see discussion in Barrett, 2013).