The embodiment of emotion-label words and emotion-laden words: Evidence from late Chinese-English bilinguals.

Although increasing studies have confirmed the distinction between emotion-label words (words directly label emotional states) and emotion-laden words (words evoke emotions through connotations), the existing evidence is inconclusive, and their embodiment is unknown. In the current study, the emotional categorization task was adopted to investigate whether these two types of emotion words are embodied by directly comparing how they are processed in individuals' native language (L1) and the second language (L2) among late Chinese-English bilinguals. The results revealed that apart from L2 negative emotion-laden words, both types of emotion words in L1 and L2 produced significant emotion effects, with faster response times and/or higher accuracy rates. In addition, processing facilitation for emotion-label words over emotion-laden words was observed irrespective of language operation; a significant three-way interaction between the language, valence and emotion word type was noted. Taken together, this study suggested that the embodiment of emotion words is modulated by the emotion word type, and L2 negative emotion-laden words tend to be affectively disembodied. The disassociation between emotion-label and emotion-laden words is confirmed in both L1 and L2 and therefore, future emotion word research should take the emotion word type into account.

The negation-induced forgetting effect remains even after reducing associative interference.

Recent research has provided evidence that negation processing recruits the neural network of response inhibition (de Vega et al., 2016). Furthermore, inhibition mechanisms also play a role in human memory. In two experiments, we aimed to assess how producing a negation in a verification task may impact long-term memory. Experiment 1 used the same memory paradigm as Mayo et al. (2014), consisting of several phases: first, reading a story describing the activity of a protagonist, immediately followed by a "yes-no" verification task, then a distractive task, and finally an incidental free recall test. Consistent with the previous results, negated sentences were recalled worse than affirmed sentences. Yet, there is a possible confounding between the effect of negation itself and the associative interference of two conflicting predicates - the original and the modified one - in negative trials. To avoid this, Experiment 2 modified the paradigm by including a story describing the activities of two protagonists in such a way that the affirmed and denied verification sentences had the same content, and only differed in the attribution of a specific event to the correct or wrong protagonist. The negation-induced forgetting effect was still powerful, while controlling for potential contaminating variables. Our finding would support that the impaired long-term memory could be ascribed to reusing the inhibitory mechanism of negation.

Language switching may facilitate the processing of negative responses.

It has been proposed that processing sentential negation recruits the neural network of inhibitory control (de Vega et al., 2016; Beltrán et al., 2021). In addition, inhibition mechanisms also play a role in switching languages for bilinguals (Kroll et al., 2015). Since both processes may share inhibitory resources, the current study explored for the first time whether and how language-switching influences the processing of negation. To this end, two groups of Spanish-English bilinguals participated in an encoding-verification memory task. They read short stories involving the same two protagonists (Montse and Jordi), referring to their activities in four different scenarios in Spanish or English. Following each story, the participants received verification questions requiring "yes" or "no" responses depending on whether a given fact was correctly referred to one of the protagonists. Some of the verification questions were in the story's original language (non-switch condition) and others in the alternate language (switch condition). Results revealed that language-switching facilitated negative responses compared to affirmative responses, exclusively for questions switching from dominant language (L1) to non-dominant language (L2). This effect might reflect that the domain-general mechanisms of inhibitory control are recruited at least partially for both language switch and negation process simultaneously, although this phenomenon is modulated by language dominance.