Emotion and identity in second language learning

Catherine Caldwell-Harris, Ph.D.

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

Foreword

“Are you carrying a weapon?”

Charles De Gaulle airport. The airline employee had dismissed my attempts to use French and asked me the required standard questions in what he knew to be my native language, English.

By appearance, my interrogator was a North African immigrant to France, probably near my own young age. My French was a tourist’s brave attempt; he had the precision of many years of immersion.

Me: “No.”

“In France, we say every woman carries a weapon.” [long pause] “Her cunt.”

Bulls-eye. He had succeeded in turning the tables on my white American power. Did the blood drain from my face? Did I stammer? I somehow managed to walk to my gate to board my plane for home, too hurt and confused to think of complaining to a manager.

It was the 1990s. Researchers were not yet studying how using a proficient vs. non-proficient language intersected with ethnicity, country-of-residence, identity and one’s position in a social caste system. The book you are about to read brings a suite of accomplished authors to ask and answer these questions. Here I provide some background in the form of my experience with, and excitement for, this topic.

A decade after the airport encounter I was studying a piece of this complex phenomenon in my psycholinguistics laboratory: insults and taboo words hit us the hardest when we encounter them in our native language. The French airport worker could use language for some crude fun, to alleviate the stress of a repetitive job and pushback against the privilege of a young white woman who had the resources and passport for international travel. His native English-speaking victim would feel the full weight of those words. Because English was probably his third or even fourth language, he could treat those taboo phrases like play money.

My research on emotion and language arose from running a laboratory at a university with a multilingual, multicultural study body. While hanging out in the lab, a graduate student produced a double-entendre with a smirk, anticipating the puzzled expression of our Turkish post-doctoral student, Ayse Ayçiçeği. But on this occasion, she laughed heartily. The grad student shook his head, impressed. “You’re English is getting too good, Ayse.” Ayse responded with a flourish in her Turkish-accented English, “I can tell a sex joke in English, but I cannot tell a sex joke in Turkish.”

Click! We stared at each other – we had a research idea. We dove into the small but growing literature on how emotions are experienced differently when encountered in a first language (L1) compared to a second language (L2); see reviews in Pavlenko (2005, 2012) and (Dewaele, 2010). Bilingual novelists had long commented on the different emotional resonances they experienced in their two languages (Kinginger, 2004). Bond and Lai (1986) reported that their bilingual participants felt freer to discuss embarrassing topics in their L2. Gonzalez-Reigosa (1976) conducted one of the earliest laboratory studies on this topic, drawing on the finding that emotional words are normally remembered better than neutral words.

To measure emotionality, my lab used both ratings and skin conductance. In our 2003 study, Turkish immigrants to the U.S. (meaning, late learners of English) reported feeling less strongly the emotions associated with English taboo phrases and childhood reprimands, compared to translation equivalents in Turkish (Harris, Ayçiçeği & Gleason, 2003). But was there something special about the first acquired language that gave it unique emotional resonance? One reason to suspect this is that early acquired language could entwine more tightly with neural structures mediating emotional response, given that in childhood, a first language develops simultaneously with the brain’s emotion regulation systems. Our team (and research findings) argued no. Consistent with an embodiment perspective, what matters isn’t an early acquisition, but proficiency. A later learned language can come to be more emotional than the first acquired language when it becomes the dominant language. Indeed, the native language can then suffer emotional attrition. After decades of living in North America, my German colleague reported that during phone calls to her parents, using German felt like “wearing mittens.” We coined our proposal the emotional contexts of learning hypothesis: Emotional resonances accrue to words and phrases when they are learned and used in emotional environments (Harris, Gleason & Acyicegi, 2006; Caldwell-Harris, 2015).

Emotionality differences between a first (or more proficient language) and a second (or less proficient language) have now been widely documented using diverse techniques (see review in Pavlenko, 2012). Indeed, an entire paper has been written about the taboo word hurled at me in the 1990s airport exchange (Dewaele, 2018, calls this verbal dynamite). A strong L1 emotionality advantage has been found using the attentional blink paradigm (Colbeck & Bowers, 2012). Event-related potentials have also been used to investigate the time course of activation of emotional words in L1 vs. L2. Opitz and Degner (2012) examined components of the ERP signal that are believed to be modulated by emotional valence. One of these is the early posterior negativity (EPN) which occurs more strongly for emotional words compared to neutral words. Those authors found that positive; and negative words elicited larger EPNs than neutral words for German bilinguals, but with a time lag in the L2 compared to L1. The implication is that emotional words are not activated as quickly in a second language as in a first. This could potentially be related to the subjective feeling of decreased emotionality.