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Cross-language semantic-affective interaction – with evidence from Chinese EFL learners

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2024

Xuanchen Ye Open the ORCID record for Xuanchen Ye [Opens in a new window]  and
Cuilian Zhao
Xuanchen Ye
Affiliation:
School of Foreign Languages, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China
Cuilian Zhao*
Affiliation:
Center for Linguistics, Literary & Cultural Studies/Dictionary Research Center, Sichuan International Studies University, Chongqing, China
*
Corresponding author: Cuilian Zhao Email: clzhao@sisu.edu.cn
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Abstract

Semantic and affective priming have long been treated separately in psycholinguistic studies. Recently, however, the question of whether and how these two primings interact has become controversial, especially in cross-language contexts where such discussions are rare. In the present study, four mixed-design experiments were conducted with Chinese EFL learners to investigate cross-language semantic-affective interactions: 3 (prime valence: negative, positive, neutral) × 2 (semantic relatedness: related, unrelated). Results show that semantic priming effects occurred in the L1L1 and L1L2 conditions, whereas affective priming effects were observed in the L2L2 condition. In the L2L1 priming condition, only emotion primes induced cross-language priming. These results suggest that semantic and emotional accesses are activated automatically and separately, but can facilitate cross-language word processing mutually. The results support the hierarchical representation of semantic features of emotion words from L1 to L2 in the unbalanced bilingual mental lexicon, while affective attributes are spread across a distributed network.

Keywords

semantic primingaffective primingcross-language emotion word representationbilingual mental lexicon
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , First View , pp. 1 - 11
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This article has earned badges for transparent research practices: Open Data and Open Materials. For details see the Data Availability Statement.

In the present study, “EFL” is an abbreviation for “English as a Foreign Language”.

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