Can Harry Potter still put a spell on us in a second language? An fMRI study on reading emotion-laden literature in late bilinguals

Processing emotional words in two languages with one brain: ERP and fMRI evidence from Chinese–English bilinguals

“…Hsu et al (2015) also found that emotional processing in L1 was more profound and had more distinctive patterns. This finding, which was not present in the current study, might rise from the types of emotional materials that were used in two studies.…”

“…Due to its high temporal or spatial resolution, both ERP and fMRI techniques have been used to investigate the neural mechanisms of emotional word processing in monolinguals (see Citron, 2012 for a review). So far, two published ERP studies (Conrad et al, 2011;Opitz & Degner, 2012) and one fMRI study (Hsu et al, 2015) have examined bilingual emotional word processing. The present study, for the first time, used both ERPs and fMRIalong with behavioral measures to investigate the time course and the underlying neural mechanism of emotional word processing in L1 and L2.…”

“…A recent fMRI study found that L1 and L2 emotional text both elicited emotional responses effectively (Hsu, Jacobs, & Conrad, 2015). Hsu et al (2015) also found that emotional processing in L1 was more profound and had more distinctive patterns.…”

“…This finding, which was not present in the current study, might rise from the types of emotional materials that were used in two studies. In Hsu et al (2015), emotional passages were used, which were likely to induce more profound emotional activation than single word processing in the current study. The more profound activation in L1 might result from the accumulating effect of slight emotional activation difference between two languages, which is difficult to detect in single word processing context.…”

Finding the plot in science storytelling in hopes of enhancing science communication

“…Cognitive science research indicates that nonnative languages evoke weaker emotions in bilingual listeners than equivalent words in one's mother tongue (15). When a major scientific discovery generates little public interest, there is a similar disconnect between content and emotional impact.…”