Effect of culture relatedness on affective neural responses to words in L1 and L2: ERP studies

Abstract

This study investigates affective responses to words in bilinguals’ native (L1) and second (L2) languages. Specifically, we examine how the extent to which concepts are related to one’s own native or second culture influences these emotional responses. While previous research has shown that emotional responses are often attenuated in the L2 compared to the L1, the role of culture in this phenomenon remains underexplored. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we recorded neural responses from 34 Mandarin-English bilinguals during valence judgment tasks involving emotionally positive or neutral words. The words were either related to Chinese culture, e.g., rice, British culture, e.g., scones, or unrelated to either culture, e.g., sake, and were either positive or neutral in valence, e.g., lotus flower vs. chopsticks. Each participant completed experiments in both their L1 (Mandarin) and L2 (British English). Behavioral results revealed faster reaction times for positive words and significant interactions between emotional valence and culture relatedness, in both L1 and L2. ERP analyses focused on two key components: the early posterior negativity (EPN), associated with early emotional attention, and the late positive potential (LPC), reflecting sustained affective engagement. In the L2, a significant main effect of valence was observed on the EPN. In contrast, no main effect of valence was found in the L1; instead, significant main effects of culture relatedness were observed on both the EPN and LPC components. Our results suggest that culture relatedness can influence the affective processing of words and modulate neural responses and provide new evidence that culture relatedness shapes bilinguals’ emotional experiences at both behavioral and neural levels, above and beyond the well-established overall “emotional distance” from L2.