An Experimental Study On Emotional Stroop Effect Of Chinese-English Bilinguals

The thesis first made an overview on the studies and researches in the field of Stroop Effect study. With many variants in Stroop Effect study. This dissertation took Emotional Stroop Effect as the focus. Emotional Stroop Effect refers to the interference effect of the emotional meaning of emotional words on color naming of emotional words, leading to a longer reaction time.The present research mainly studies the emotional Stroop effect of four-character Chinese idioms and English phrases on the basis of previous studies. The 2 x 3 x 4(language types x emotion valence of the stimuli x colors of the stimuli) experimental paradigm was used in the experiments. There are mainly two experiments in the present study. In the experiments, there are 30 four-character Chinese emotional idioms(positive, negative and neutral) and the corresponding 30 English emotional phrases(positive, negative and neutral)written in four different colors---red, yellow, blue and green. The 50 randomly selected subjects from the English department of Xihua University(30 females, 20 males) in the experiments were asked to name the color of the emotional stimulus and their reaction time was recorded by E-prime during the experiment. E-prime is a kind of software widely used in psycho-linguistic studies. In the present study, E-prime was used to construct the experiment process and record the participants’ reaction time. All the idioms and phrases are chosen from the Chinese version and the English version of Fortress Besieged. Then, the data from the experiment were analyzed by SPSS 19.0. The participants were divided into a male group and a female group.The results from the experiment indicate that emotional Stroop effect dose exist among Chinese-English bilinguals when the stimulus materials are Chinese idioms and English phrases, and there is no significant gender difference. Under the Chinese idioms condition, the main interference occurs in negative emotional idioms, and there is slight interference in positive emotional idioms as well, which is different from the situation in English. Under the English phrases condition, the emotional Stroop effect appears in negative phrases, but there is no significant interference in positive phrases stimuli. The present study found no significant gender difference. The reason for this may be the small number of samples and the uneven subjects number of male and female in the experiments. So it is necessary to do further researches on gender difference in Chinese emotional idioms and English emotionalphrases. As all the subjects in the present experiment come from the English department of Xihua University and there is no significant age difference among the subjects, the data from the present experiments have some limitations. It is indispensable to make further explorations in the future.