The Impact Of L2Proficiency On Emotion Words Representation In The Bilingual Mental Lexicon

The research is aimed at exploring the bilingual emotional Stroop effect inChinese-English bilinguals at different levels. Forty participants have been experimented bymeans of bilingual emotional Stroop task. They are divided into2groups in accordance withthe English proficiency level: the group at higher English proficiency level and the group atlower English proficiency level. Besides, it analyzes and compares participants’ response timewhen they finish the task of color naming under the stimulus condition of3differentemotional words: positive, neutral and negative. Results indicate that:(1) Under the stimuluscondition of Chinese, the interference phenomenon arises in participants of both groups.Compared with neutral words, there exists a delay of response time in positive and negativewords during the experimental task. Under the stimulus condition of English, the interferencephenomenon can still be found in participants of the group at higher English proficiency level,while no significant interference can be found in participants of the group at lower Englishproficiency level.(2) The result of analysis on variance manifests that: as for the group atlower English proficiency level, the interaction between the stimulus language and wordscategory is significant, F=3.415, Sig.=0.033, P<0.05; as for the group of higher Englishproficiency level, the interaction between the stimulus language and words category isinsignificant, F=0.197, Sig.=0.821, p>0.05.(3) The significant interaction among the sex,words category and stimulus language has not been found.In conclusion, the findings of the current study suggest that the emotional Stroop effectexist in both languages of the unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals. However, theemotionally charged words do not have the same intensity in the two languages of the bilingualswho have different English proficiency. Under the stimulus condition of Chinese, the emotionalStroop effect arises in participants of both groups. Under the stimulus condition of English, theresults of the two groups are different. The proficiency level of the second language is asignificant factor to take impact on the bilingual emotional Stroop effect. The emotional Stroopeffect can be found in both languages of the group at higher English proficiency level, while itcan only be found under the stimulus condition of Chinese of the group at lower English proficiency level. There is no significant difference between different genders in this bilingualemotional Stroop task.