Bilingualism reading group

Speaker: Giulia Daniela Utzeri

Title: Blood and sugar: Emotional response in bilinguals

Abstract: The idea that an individual’s first language has the power to evoke emotions in a way that a second language never will is quite common. The research conducted thus far on this topic has confirmed that differences in emotionality levels between the first and second language are present (Harris et al, 2003; Gawinkowska et al, 2013; Keysar et al, 2012; Costa et al; 2014). However, some researchers have argued that emotionality levels vary according to themes and autobiographical experience (Aragno & Schlachet, 1996; Altarriba, 2003), rather than following the first/second language split. An analysis of the findings in the literature supports this view, though not conclusively.

My undergraduate dissertation investigated whether different emotionality levels are elicited by highly emotionally arousing themes such as violent language and sexually explicit language and, where this is the case, whether this pattern reveals the first language to be the language of emotion, or whether each language correlates emotionally to specific themes. An experiment was conducted with 32 Italian-English bilinguals, and a questionnaire was circulated online to gather bilinguals’ self-reports on this topic. The hypothesis that the first language would always elicit stronger emotional reactions found no support in the results, and instead, a significant negative correlation was found between the dominant language of the participants and their rating of sexually explicit language. The implications of these findings are discussed as relating to the previous literature, and suggestions are made for further research in this as-of-yet small field.