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A bilingual advantage has been found in prosody understanding in pre-school children. To understand this advantage better, we asked 73 children (6-8 years) to identify the emotional valence of spoken words, based on either semantics or emotional prosody (which were either consistent or discrepant with each other). Bilingual experience ranged from no to equal exposure to and use of two languages. Both age and bilingual experience predicted accurate identification of prosody, particularly for trials where the semantics were discrepant with the targeted prosody. Bilingual experience, but not age, predicted a prosodic bias, meaning that participants had more difficulty ignoring the irrelevant discrepant prosody when the task was to identify the semantics of the word. The decline of a semantic bias was predicted by age and bilingual experience together. Our results suggest that previous findings on the bilingual advantage in prosody processing may in fact be driven by a prosodic bias.

Previous research has found that reading increases overall vocabulary size, and that reading fiction, specifically, is associated with higher levels of empathy and better perspective-taking skills. The current study investigated a potential link between reading habits and emotional vocabulary in particular, to assess whether the link between reading and empathy could be specifically related to emotion words. A total of 415 Swedish secondary and upper secondary school students were asked to generate words in various emotional categories, and to report their reading habits. Generally, females produced more words than males. For all participants, the largest amount of words was produced in the neutral, followed by positive, then the negative category. Crucially, the frequent readers produced more emotional words than the less frequent readers, suggesting that reading habits are associated with emotional vocabulary. We discuss the implications of these findings for the understanding of the link between reading and emotional competence.

We investigated how operationalizing bilingualism affects the results on a Simon task in a population of monolingual and bilingual native English speakers (N = 166). Bilingualism was measured in different ways within participants, and the measurements were used both as dichotomous and continuous variables. Our results show that the statistical significance and effect size varied across operationalizations. Specifically, the Composite Factor Score (the Language and Social Background Questionnaire’s general score), showed a bilingual disadvantage on reaction times regardless of how it was used (dichotomously or continuously). When dividing participants into monolinguals and bilinguals based on the Nonnative Language Social Use score (a Language and Social Background Questionnaire subscore), differences in accuracy and reaction times were found between the groups, but the Nonnative Language Social Use score did not predict accuracy when used as a continuous variable (only reaction times). Finally, earlier age of acquisition predicted faster reaction times, but only when used on a continuum. Effect sizes were between the small and medium range. No differences on the Simon effect were found. Our results call for cautiousness when comparing studies using different types of measurements, highlight the need for clarity and transparency when describing samples, and stresses the need for more research on the operationalization of bilingualism.

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