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Skin conductance levels (SCLs) of native and non-native English speakers were measured during emotional and taboo Stroop tasks. Significantly slower response times to negative and taboo words when compared to neutral words were found in both groups of participants, but positive words were not found to differ significantly from neutral words. No differences between native and non-native speakers in their behavioural responses were present: the pattern of interference from negative and taboo words was found to be identical in L1 and L2. SCLs, however, did reveal differences between the native and non-native participants: native English speakers responded with significantly higher SCLs to negative and taboo words when compared with neutral and positive words. This difference was not observed in non-native speakers, although there was a trend for taboo words to elicit greater SCLs than positive words. This suggests that, although the two groups responded in a very similar manner on a behavioural level, the level of arousal produced by the negative and taboo words for native English speakers was greater than that for non-native speakers.A number of scholars have argued for the need to investigate emotions in bilinguals, but only recently have these questions been taken up by researchers (Pavlenko, 2006). One of the central questions to this area of investigation is whether bilinguals' first (L1) and second language (L2) differ in their emotionality. Studies using self-reports of emotional force (e.g.

This article presents affective ratings for 210 British English and Finnish nouns, including taboo words. The norms were collected with 135 native British English and 304 native Finnish speakers, who rated the words according to their emotional valence, emotional charge, offensiveness, concreteness, and familiarity. The ratings between the two languages were found to be strongly correlated. The present ratings were also strongly correlated with the American English emotional valence and arousal ratings available in the Affective Norms for English Words database (Bradley & Lang, 1999) and the Janschewitz (2008) database for taboo words. These ratings will help researchers to select stimulus materials for a wide range of experiments involving both monolingual and bilingual processing of British English and Finnish emotional words. Materials associated with this article may be accessed as an online supplement from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

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