The Influence Of Contextual Emotionality And Syntactic Cues On The Acquisition Of Second Language Emotional Information By Early And Late Chinese-English Bilingual

Understanding the emotional meaning of words is essential to enhance emotional communication,so the acquisition of the emotional meaning of language is the key to second language learning,but few studies have explored it.Context-based learning is an important learning way of second language.The contexts contain not only semantic anticipation information but also emotionality,syntactic structures,and other important learning cues.In addition,the age of second language acquisition is considered to be an important factor that can affect the acquisition of emotional meaning in a second language.Our study examined the effects of emotional context and syntactic cues on the acquisition of emotional information in the second language of early and late bilinguals by conducting cognitive-behavioral and ERP experiments.We compiled English sentences with positive,negative,and neutral contexts according to the valence and arousal.Syntactic cues of context were manipulated by the sentence verbs.For example,the verb “feel” is often followed by the word that denotes emotions,so it belongs to the high emotion constraint verb,while the linking verb belongs to the low emotion constraint verb.The experiments were divided into the study stage and the test stage.Participants were asked to learn English pseudowords under different sentence frames through varied emotional contexts in the study stage.In the test stage,the word-recognition task is used to test the study effect.The word rating task examines the external processing of the emotional information of the learned words.The crosslanguage priming task examines whether the emotional information of the learned words can be automatically activated.Experiment 1 recruited 34 late Chinese-English bilinguals with the age of acquisition of English over 9 years old.The valence rating task found that the pleasant scores of pseudowords learned in the positive context were significantly higher than that in the negative context and the neutral context,and in the negative context were lower than that in the neutral context,which indicated that the learned words obtained the corresponding emotional information of contexts.The cross-language priming task found that when the learning contexts were positive and negative,compared with neutral contexts,the learned words significantly promoted the processing of Chinese target words in emotionconsistent condition.It showed an emotional priming effect,which indicated that the acquired emotional information can be automatically activated.Experiment 1 did not find the effects of syntactic cues,which may be the low sensitivity to syntactic structures of late bilinguals.To test this hypothesis,Experiment 2recruited 33 early Chinese-English bilinguals who had acquired English less than or equal to 9 years old.The word rating task found that the pleasant scores of the learned words in the negative context were significantly lower than that in the positive and neutral contexts.The results indicated that the negative emotional information of the context could be transferred to the words so that the learned words obtained negative emotional information.The cross-language priming task found that under the low-constraint sentence frame in the positive context,it showed the emotional priming effect.And under the low-constraint sentence frame of the negative context,the emotional priming effect also occurred.These results suggested that the learned emotional meaning could be automatically activated,and the activation could be moderated by syntactic cues.To investigate the neural mechanism of emotional information acquisition in the second language,Experiment 3 combined with ERP to verify the results of Experiment2.We recruited 42 early Chinese-English bilinguals who had acquired English less than or equal to 9 years old.In the word rating task,it found that the pleasant scores of the learned words in the negative contexts were significantly lower than that in the positive and neutral contexts.ERP analysis found that a larger P2 component was induced by words which learned under the low-constraint sentence frame in the positive context and a larger P2 under the high-constraint sentence frame in the neutral contexts.The results indicated that the positive emotional information could be transferred to learned words and processed in early stage.In addition,words learned in the positive context under highconstraint frame induced a more negative N400 component,and words learned under low-constraint frame in the neutral context induced a more negative N400 component,and it suggested that learned words acquired positive emotional information,and the emotionality of learned words could promote emotional meaning processing.In the crosslanguage priming task,it was found that under the low-constraint sentence frame in the positive context,learning words significantly promoted the processing of Chinese target words in emotion consistent condition,and an emotional priming effect occurred.ERP analysis also found that in the positive context,compared with the high-constraint sentence frame,the learned words induced a more negative EPN component under the low-constraint sentence frame,which indicated that the emotional information of the learned words under the low-constraint sentence frame can be automatically activated in the early stage.The above results suggested that the emotionality of the learning context was conducive to the acquisition of the emotional information of the second language,which was manifested both in the explicit and automatic processing of the learned words,in which the syntactic cues could moderate the effect of the emotional context.Moreover,early second-language learning experiences can influence the acquisition of emotional information in second languages through syntactic cues.