Hemispheric asymmetry of emotion words in a non-native mind: A divided visual field study

Abstract

This study investigates hemispheric specialization for emotional words among proficient non-native speakers of English by means of the divided visual field paradigm. The motivation behind the study is to extend the monolingual hemifield research to the non-native context and see how emotion words are processed in a non-native mind. Sixty eight females participated in the study, all highly proficient in English. The stimuli comprised 12 positive nouns, 12 negative nouns, 12 non-emotional nouns and 36 pseudo-words. To examine the lateralization of emotion, stimuli were presented unilaterally in a random fashion for 180 ms in a go/no-go lexical decision task. The perceptual data showed a right hemispheric advantage for processing speed of negative words and a complementary role of the two hemispheres in the recognition accuracy of experimental stimuli. The data indicate that processing of emotion words in non-native language may require greater interhemispheric communication, but at the same time demonstrates a specific role of the right hemisphere in the processing of negative relative to positive valence. The results of the study are discussed in light of the methodological inconsistencies in the hemifield research as well as the non-native context in which the study was conducted.

A Comparison of Turkish-English Bilinguals’ Processing of Emotion Words in Their Two Languages

“…In contrast, Jonczyk (2013), reported shorter latencies and higher accuracy rates for negative words. This result was supported by another study conducted with late bilinguals (Jonczyk, 2014). Better performance in processing negative words were reported for Chinese-English bilinguals by Chen (2015).…”

The influence of word valence on the right visual field advantage in the VHF paradigm: time to adjust the expectations

“…At first sight, our data further complicate the picture because we obtained no differences in RVF advantage between the three types of stimuli (in line with Kanske & Kotz, 2007). Furthermore, in our study positive words were responded to more rapidly (771 ms) than negative (786 ms) and neutral words (791 ms Holtgraves & Felton, 2011;Kanske & Kotz, 2007), sometimes below the other two conditions (Fussell et al, 2012;Jończyk, 2015), and sometimes above the other conditions (Martin & Altarriba, 2017).…”

“…Holtgraves and Felton (2011) also reported an overall RVF advantage for the recognition of words, but the interaction between type of word and VHF indicated a deviating pattern for negative words, in particular highly arousing negative words, which showed a LVF advantage, in line with VSH predictions. A smaller RVF advantage for negative words than for positive and neutral words was also reported by Martin and Altarriba (2017), but not by Jończyk (2015) who found a smaller RVF advantage for neutral words than for positive and negative words. Martin and Altarriba (2017) further compared emotion-labelled words (words that refer to positive or negative emotions, e.g.…”

“…Previous studies had returned conflicting evidence, summarized in Table 1. While some researchers found results in line with the Valence-Specific Hypothesis (Holtgraves & Felton, 2011;Martin & Altarriba, 2017), others found patterns suggesting no difference in processing between emotional and neutral words (Kanske & Kotz, 2007) or found interactions between VHF and word type that suggested other laterality configurations (Fussell et al, 2011;Jończyk, 2015;Kuruoglu & Mergen, 2016;Mohr et al, 2005Mohr et al, , 2008.…”

“…flower or weapon), but found no differences between them. Jończyk (2015) tested Polish-English bilinguals in their second language (English), which may have been an important factor, as Kuruoglu and Mergen (2016) observed that Turkish monolinguals showed a significant RVF advantage for emotion words (both positive and negative), whereas Turkish-English bilinguals did not show such an advantage.…”