The picture-word task presents participants with a number of pictured objects together with a written distractor word superimposed upon each picture, and their task is to name the depicted object while ignoring the distractor word. Depending on the specifc picture and word combination, various efects, including the identity facilitation efect (e.g., DOG+dog) and the semantic interference efect (e.g., GOAT+cow), are often observed. The response patterns of the picture-word task in terms of naming latencies refect the mechanisms underlying lexical selection in speech production. Research using this method, however, has typically focused on alphabetic languages, or involved bilingual populations, making it difcult to specifcally investigate orthographic efects in isolation. In this paper, we report fve experiments investigating the role of orthography in the picture-word task by varying distractor script (using the multiscriptal language Japanese, and pseudohomophonic spellings in English) across three diferent populations (Japanese monolinguals, Japanese-English bilinguals, and English monolinguals), investigating both the identity facilitation efect and the semantic interference efect. The results generally show that the magnitude of facilitation is afected by orthography even within a single language. The findings and specifc patterns of results are discussed in relation to current theories on speech production.

Learning new information constitutes a fundamental part of children's school years. Reently, studies have found beneficial effects of emotion on learning and memory. Here, we specifically examined the effect of positive emotional prosody on content learning in two groups of Swedish school children (ages 8-10 and 11-13 years). The participants listened to auditory information spoken in a positive or neutral tone of voice and were asked content-based questions about the information. For the younger children, no difference was found between the number of correct answers to the questions for the positive compared to the neutral tone of voice. The older children, however, had significantly more correct answers in the positive compared to the neutral condition, suggesting that positive emotional prosody can have beneficial effects on content learning, at least in older children. These results may have implications for educational psychology, and the development of Information and Communication Technology.

Aims and objectives: This study aimed to establish whether adults have a preference for semantics or emotional prosody (EP) when identifying the emotional valence of an utterance, and whether this is affected by bilingualism. Additionally, we wanted to determine whether the prosodic bias (PB) found in bilingual children in a previous study persisted through adulthood. 

Design: Sixty-three adults with varying levels of bilingualism identified the emotional valence of words with positive, negative or neutral semantics expressed with a positive, negative, or neutral EP. In Part 1, participants chose whichever cue felt most natural to them (out of semantics or prosody). In Part 2, participants were instructed to identify either the semantics or the prosody in different experimental blocks.

Data and analysis: In Part 1, a one-sample t-test was used to determine whether one type of cue was preferred. Furthermore, a linear regression was used with the participants’ language profile score (measured with the Language and Social Background Questionnaire, LSBQ) as a predictor and how often prosody was chosen as the outcome variable. In Part 2, we ran a linear regression with the LSBQ score as the predictor and a PB score as the outcome. 

Findings: In Part 1, participants chose semantics and prosody equally often, and the LSBQ score did not predict a preference for prosody. In Part 2, higher LSBQ scores lead to a larger PB.

Originality: This is the first study to show that bilingual adults, like children, have an increased bias towards EP the more bilingual they are, but only under constrained experimental conditions.

Implications: This study was the first to empirically investigate the conscious choice of emotional cues in speech. Furthermore, we discuss theoretical implications of our results in relation to methodological limitations with experimental settings in bilingual research.

We investigated how operationalizing bilingualism affects the results on a Simon task in a population of monolingual and bilingual native English speakers (N = 166). Bilingualism was measured in different ways within participants, and the measurements were used both as dichotomous and continuous variables. Our results show that the statistical significance and effect size varied across operationalizations. Specifically, the Composite Factor Score (the Language and Social Background Questionnaire’s general score), showed a bilingual disadvantage on reaction times regardless of how it was used (dichotomously or continuously). When dividing participants into monolinguals and bilinguals based on the Nonnative Language Social Use score (a Language and Social Background Questionnaire subscore), differences in accuracy and reaction times were found between the groups, but the Nonnative Language Social Use score did not predict accuracy when used as a continuous variable (only reaction times). Finally, earlier age of acquisition predicted faster reaction times, but only when used on a continuum. Effect sizes were between the small and medium range. No differences on the Simon effect were found. Our results call for cautiousness when comparing studies using different types of measurements, highlight the need for clarity and transparency when describing samples, and stresses the need for more research on the operationalization of bilingualism.

Recently, a relationship between bilingualism and enhanced social flexibility has been suggested. However, research on the subject is scarce and what little exists is limited by several conceptual and methodological concerns. In the current study, we attempted to (a) replicate the findings from a study by Ikizer and Ramírez-Esparza (Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 21:957–969, 2018) by using the scales that the authors developed, and (b) test the concept of social flexibility experimentally with a switch-task using socially relevant stimuli. In the first part, participants (n = 194) filled out the scales developed by Ikizer and Ramírez-Esparza. We could not find that bilingualism leads to enhanced social flexibility. We did, however, find that higher level of education led to higher scores on the social flexibility scale. In the second part, a subsample (n = 74) from Part 1 completed a task where they were asked to identify the congruency between a face and a voice based on either gender or emotion, and to switch between these two tasks. The experimental task did not show an advantage for the bilingual participants. On the contrary, higher proficiency in a second language led to lower accuracy in the congruent emotion condition, while level of education led to higher accuracy in that same condition. We suggest that factors other than bilingualism, such as level of education and biculturalism, most likely drove the effect found both in the current study and originally by Ikizer and Ramírez-Esparza.

We investigated the effect of second language use on the experienced vividness and emotionality of negative autobiographical memories. Fifty native Swedish speakers with English as their second language were asked to recall a negative episodic memory from their past in their native language. Half the participants were then asked to reactivate the same memory in their first language while the other half were asked to reactivate it in their second language, and then rate their experienced vividness and emotionality a second time. Following this reactivation, experienced emotionality was reduced for both groups of participants, with asimilar magnitude of reduction for both groups. Experienced vividness, however, was only reduced for the group who reactivated the memory in their second language. No difference in intrusion frequency was found between the groups at a one-week follow-up. The results provide increased insight into how a second language can affect the experienced emotionality and vividness of a negative autobiographical memory.

Previous research indicates that emotion words are processed differently from neutral words, and this emotionality effect has shown to enhance comprehension as well as learning in certain conditions (e.g.,Megalakaki et al., 2019; Tyng et al., 2017). We explored whether these emotion effects also apply to emotional prosody (emotion conveyed through tone of voice in spoken language), in a school setting. We asked 77 children in elementary and lower middle school (mean age = 8.84 years, SD = .67) and 96 children in upper middle and lower junior high school (mean age = 12.2 years, SD = .80) to listen to audio recordings describing various items and places (e.g., a traditional Northern Swedish mitten, an old Viking castle etc.). The descriptions were read either with a positive or neutral prosody, and participants were asked five questions about each text. Preliminary analyses for the younger children show no significant difference in accuracy (number of correct answers) between the positive and neutral descriptions (p > .05). However, the older children were significantly more accurate in the positive than the neutral condition, t(95) = 2.2, p = .021,d = 0.24. These results will be discussed in relation to the development of prosody (including the so-called semantic bias in younger children). The results indicate that there may be an effect of prosody in learning, particularly for older children, and may be useful in educational settings, not least in further research on Information and Communication Technology (e.g., text-to-speech tools for children with special needs).

Culture, language and emotion all influence and affect our daily lives in their own manner. Although there is a large body of research suggesting that these factors interact with each other in intricate ways, they have traditionally been studied independently of each other. Furthermore, although biculturalism and bilingualism are not new phenomena, they are now prevalent globally to the extent that research investigating culture or language cannot be complete without taking them into account. Thus, in this paper, we discuss how culture, language and emotion may mutually influence one another in a globalized world where biculturalism and bilingualism are commonplace and suggest how future research could investigate these individual factors jointly.