Investigating bilinguals’ cognitive processing of affective words in minimal linguistic contexts

The main aims of the present study are, first, to extend the current cognitive research on affective word processing in bilinguals by analyzing affective words in minimal linguistic contexts and, second, to explore the potential impact of the affective valence of prime nouns on the affective valence of target adjectives. To fulfill these aims, a semantic decision task was employed in which the Persian-English bilinguals saw a pair of words one after another, and were asked to decide whether or not the target word, which was an adjective loaded with positive or negative valence, was related in meaning to the preceding word, which was a noun. Mixed factorial repeated measure ANOVA was run on reaction times and error rates data. The results showed that bilinguals’ responses were slower and less accurate to negative target adjectives in comparison to positive target adjectives. The data further revealed that bilinguals were faster but less accurate when they were responding to related target adjectives compared to unrelated target adjectives. The results provide evidence for a dynamic interaction between cognitive and affective language processing in bilinguals.