What Heritage Bilinguals Tell Us about the Language of Emotion

Abstract

Variation in the language experience of bilinguals has consequences for cognitive and affective processes. In the current study, we examined how bilingual experience influences the relationship between language and emotion in English among a group of Spanish–English heritage bilinguals on an emotion–memory task. Participants rated the emotionality of English taboo, negative and neutral words and then completed an unexpected recognition test. To account for language experience, data were gathered on the participants’ language dominance and proficiency. Results showed emotion–memory effects in the Spanish–English heritage bilinguals’ English (the societal language): taboo words were recognized significantly better than neutral words, while the emotionality of negative words carried over and significantly affected the recognition of preceding neutral words. Furthermore, such effects were modulated by language dominance scores with more pronounced emotion–memory effects in more English-dominant bilinguals. The findings contribute to a growing body of evidence showing that emotions are not necessarily restricted to the first acquired home language. Critically, for heritage speakers, there is often a shift in language dominance from the home language to the societal language. The present study demonstrates that the effects of emotion on memory are seen in the acquired societal language.

The “emotional brain” of adolescent Spanish–German heritage speakers: is emotional intelligence a proxy for productive emotional vocabulary?

“…In other words, the HL -Spanish in our studyemerged as a particularly emotional language when recalling AMs, even if our participants self-reported a slightly lower proficiency level in their HL Spanish compared with the societal language (German). Although this finding differs from previous studies among bilinguals that used retrieval tasks or decontextualised emotional situations (Ferré et al, 2010;Vañó & Pennebaker, 1997;Vargas Fuentes et al, 2022), it allows us to conclude that the use of AMs as a methodological technique may provide useful information by uncovering heritage speakers' emotional competences. Using this technique, our study found that emotional vocabulary is particularly salient in the HL, especially when heritage speakers have the opportunity to express and explain their emotions in relation to contextualised memories that have a personal meaning for them.…”

“…We further speculated that high trait EI participants would use a more diverse emotional vocabulary, regardless of the valence of their AMs (Beheshti et al, 2020;Le Hoang & Grégoire, 2021). With regard to language status and following previous studies involving early or balanced bilinguals (Ferré et al, 2010;Vañó & Pennebaker, 1997;Vargas Fuentes et al, 2022), we expected that our bilingual participants would retrieve more emotional words in their L2 German. We also hypothesised that bilinguals' emotional vocabulary would be less diverse in their HL Spanish than in their L2 German due to the reduced availability of general vocabulary in the HL (Montrul & Polinsky, 2021).…”

Exploring working memory and language dominance in heritage bilinguals’ writing processes

“…Of equal relevance is that language dominance can shift in a bilingual’s lifetime, which is the typical case of bilingual children who learn a L1 in the home that is different from the one used in the school and spoken in the society at large (Peña et al, 2021). Considering language dominance as a multidimensional construct, as measured by the Bilingual Language Profile questionnaire (Birdsong et al, 2012), empirical studies have demonstrated that language dominance predicts HL bilinguals’ production of phonetic features that align to monolingual norms as well as their processing of emotional words in the societal language (Amengual, 2016; Vargas Fuentes et al, 2021). However, with respect to HL writing, very little is known about the role of language dominance.…”