Mid Sweden University

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.

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.

Recently, a study by Champoux-Larsson and Dylman (2018) showed that the bilingual advantage previously found in the use of emotional prosodic cues in children to infer a speaker’s emotional state (e.g., Yow & Markman, 2011) was driven by a bias towards prosody. Namely, the higher level of bilingualism the participants in ChampouxLarsson and Dylman (2018) had, the more they had difficulty ignoring prosodic emotional cues in spoken words even when they were asked to focus on the semantics of the words. While Misono et al. (1997) found that monolingual adults rely on both semantic and prosodic cues to determine emotion in speech equally, it is not known yet whether this also is true for bilingual adults. In other words, it is unclear whether the prosodic bias found in bilingual children withstands even in adulthood for bilinguals. Thus, we present a study where adults with varying levels of bilingualism were asked to determine the emotional valence of utterances based on the participant’s general impression (i.e., without specifying which cue to use), based on the utterance’s emotional prosody or based on its semantic content. The spoken words’ semantics was positive, negative or neutral and the words were uttered with either a congruent emotional prosody or with an incongruent emotional prosody. Data is currently being prepared for analysis and results will be available within the coming weeks.

The current study investigated the identification of facial expressions of emotion, a socio-emotional task that has not previously been examined in children from different linguistic environments. Eighty-four 4-year-olds growing up in one of three linguistic environments (monolingual, dominant bilingual, balanced bilingual) performed a task where they identified facial expressions (happiness, anger, sadness, fear). Accuracy was analysed with a mixed-design analysis of variance using group (monolinguals, dominant bilinguals and balanced bilinguals) and emotion (happy, angry, sad and scared) as between- and within-group variables, respectively. Our results showed a main effect of emotion, but there was no main effect of group. This suggests that 4-year-olds’ linguistic environment does not affect performance on an identification of facial expressions task. This study was the first to investigate the identification of facial expressions of emotion in children coming from different linguistic environments. As the socio-emotional development of bilinguals is not yet well understood, especially regarding the visual perception of emotions, this study is amongst the first to contribute to this area of research. Our results are therefore of significance as a building block for additional studies that should explore the visual perception of emotions in other types of tasks and populations.

We report two experiments investigating the foreign language effect (FLe) for culturally influential languages. Across two experimental paradigms, we found no FLe for Swedish participants when using their second language English. This highlights the limitations of the FLe and suggests that it may not be as robust as previously thought.

Research on bilingualism and emotions has shown stronger emotional responses in the native language (L1) compared to a foreign language. We investigated the potential of purposeful second language (L2) use as a means of decreasing the experience of psychological distress. Native Swedish speakers read and answered questions about negative and neutral texts in their L1 (Swedish) and their L2 (English) and were asked to rate their level of distress before or after the questions. The texts and associated questions were either written in the same (within-language), or different languages (cross-language). We found that within-language trials when the text was written in participants’ native language (Swedish–Swedish) resulted in an increase of distress, whilst cross-language trials (Swedish–English) resulted in a decrease of distress. This implies that purposeful second language use can diminish levels of distress experienced following a negative event encoded in one's first language.

Research on Japanese reading has generally indicated that processing of the logographic script Kanji primarily involves whole-word lexical processing and follows a semantics-to-phonology route, while the two phonological scripts Hiragana and Katakana (collectively called Kana) are processed via a sub-lexical route, and more in a phonology-to-semantics manner. Therefore, switching between the two scripts often involves switching between two reading processes, which results in a delayed response for the second script (a script switch cost). In the present study, participants responded to pairs of words that were written either in the same orthography (within-script), or in two different Japanese orthographies (cross-script), switching either between Kanji and Hiragana, or between Katakana and Hiragana. They were asked to read the words aloud (Experiments 1 and 3) and to make a semantic decision about them (Experiments 2 and 4). In contrast to initial predictions, a clear switch cost was observed when participants switched between the two Kana scripts, while script switch costs were less consistent when participants switched between Kanji and Hiragana. This indicates that there are distinct processes involved in reading of the two types of Kana, where Hiragana reading appears to bear some similarities to Kanji processing. This suggests that the role of semantic processing in Hiragana (but not Katakana) reading is more prominent than previously thought and thus, Hiragana is not likely to be processed strictly phonologically.