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It is well established that emotion is extensively influenced by language. However, previous studies mainly focus on the first language (L1) rather than the second language (L2). The current study explored whether L2 shapes emotion perception in masked priming paradigm by distinguishing emotion-label words (e.g. fear, pride) and emotion-laden words (e.g. breakup, mother). Twenty-three Chinese-English bilinguals were instructed to judge the valence of the emotional pictures that were followed by masked and briefly presented L2 emotion words. Behavioral results showed that emotional pictures primed by negative emotion-label words were processed faster and more accurate than primed by emotion-laden words. Event-related potential results further revealed that emotional pictures elicited smaller N300 primed by negative emotion-label words than by emotion-laden words. The converging evidence suggests that second language can also modulate emotion perception fast and automatically, and such modulation is dependent on emotion word type.

In the present study, we examined modulations of the second language (L2) positive emotion-label words, positive emotion-laden words, and neutral words on conflict processing in a flanker task. Twenty Chinese-English bilinguals were instructed to decide the color of the central words that were vertically surrounded by the same words with the same or different color. During the task, their cortical activation was recorded. The result showed that L2 positive emotion-laden words elicited different brain activations from emotion-label words and neutral words at both early and late stages. Differential modulations on conflict processing between positive emotion-label words and positive emotion-laden words in the L2 existed even after approach-motivation intensity was controlled. These results suggest emotion word type affects conflict processing, even in L2.

The present study compared how Cantonese-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and their typically developing counterparts perceived speech pitch and non-speech pitch information using ERP measurements. Sixteen children with ASD (mean age = 10.42 years, SD = 2.12 years) and sixteen normal controls (mean age = 9.48 years, SD =.86 years) participated in two experiments, in which Cantonese lexical tone contrasts and non-speech pitch variations were presented to children following an oddball paradigm when they watched a silent movie. The results showed that: 1) When processing speech pitch contour, the two groups did not differ in the amplitude of mismatch response (p-MMR), while typically developing controls showed larger mismatch negativity (MMN) responses than children with ASD. In the processing of speech pitch height, more positive p-MMR was observed among children with ASD than among normal controls and stronger MMN was found for typically developing children than for children with ASD. 2) For the processing of non-speech pitch, MMN rather than p-MMR was observed and the two groups did not differ significantly with each other in the amplitudes of MMN. These results indicated that Cantonese-speaking children with ASD manifested impaired ability when processing speech pitch information (i.e., lexical tone), which was in line with previous research. However, they did not show the advantage in processing non-speech or auditory pitch information, which was not in agreement with the previous studies. Results were discussed from the perspective of how language background (i.e., Cantonese) might shape the perceptive abilities of children., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)