Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Leticia Sarli | Email: leti.sarli@gmail.com
Leticia Sarli1°2°3°, Alexis Cadoux4°, Nadia Justel1°2°
1° Laboratorio Interdisciplinario de Neurociencia Cognitiva (LINC), CINN – UP
2° Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)
3° Universidad Nacional de Córdoba
4° Aix-Marseille Université
Memory, language, and emotions are deeply interconnected. Evidence has shown that emotionality influences memory recall and recognition in monolinguals; for bilinguals, the evidence is mixed. This study aimed to investigate the verbal memory performance of bilinguals who acquired their second language (L2) later in life, across three emotional conditions (positive, negative, and neutral). Thirty-one Spanish French bilinguals performed an encoding-retrieval task over two days, with a seven-day interval. On session one, participants assessed the emotionality of a given word and later performed a surprise recall task. After a 7-day interval, they performed a deferred free recall task and an old/new recognition task. Results showed that immediate recall outperformed deferred recall, favouring L1 positive and L2 neutral words. Participants’ decision-making processes were assessed through STD on the old/new recognition task, using bias (C) and sensitivity (d’) indexes. For sensitivity, participants had a higher score in their L2, with emotional words showing less bias than neutral. Particularly bias shifted between L1 and L2: L1 exhibited a conservative bias, while L2 showed a liberal bias for negative words. These results highlight significant differences in how emotional and neutral words are processed and remembered in L1 and L2, both in terms of accuracy and the underlying decision-making processes for recall and recognition.