Physiological evidence for perceptive difference of native and second language emotional words among bilinguals

authors:

avatar Mansur Bayrami 1 , avatar Hasan Ashayeri 2 , avatar Yahya Modarresi 3 , avatar Abbas Bakhshipur 1 , avatar Hashem Farhangdoost 1 , *

Dept. of Psychology, School of Psychology, Tabriz University, Tabriz, Iran
Dept. of Neurology, School of Rehabilitation Sciences, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Dept. of Linguistics, Human Sciences and Cultural Education Institute, Tehran, Iran

how to cite: Bayrami M, Ashayeri H, Modarresi Y, Bakhshipur A, Farhangdoost H. Physiological evidence for perceptive difference of native and second language emotional words among bilinguals. J Kermanshah Univ Med Sci. 2012;16(5):e77356. 

Abstract

Background: Bilingual individuals reported that they experience more intensive emotions in native language. This study tries to investigate this claim psychophysiologicaly. The effect of age and second language acquisition context on physiological appearances of first and second languages were also investigated.
 Methods: 60Turkish and Kurdish bilinguals were explored. The emotional stimuli employed in this study were composed of words and phrases indicating anger (insult and curse) and words and phrases indicating affections and admiration. The heart rate of participants was recorded by a biofeedback system during hearing of emotional words in two languages during three phases of base, happiness and anger. The collected data analyzed using Repeated Measures of ANOVA.
Results: The Findings demonstrated that in both Turkish and Kurdish bilinguals, hearing  phrases indicating anger (insults and curse) in native language produces more acceleration in heart rate than hearing them in second language, and hearing endearment phrases (happy) in native language increased more heart rate than hearing them in second language.
Conclusion: Heart rate recording is a useable and sensitive method for studying psycho physiological correlations of language.
 Physiological appearances of encountering with auditory words and phrases in native and second languages were significantly different, and this indicated that, in early successive bilinguals, native language has more emotional intensity.

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