An ERP investigation of the emotionality effects on L2 semantic processing: evidence from late Chinese-English bilinguals

To date, a profitable line of research has investigated the effects of emotionality on isolated word processing. However, the emotionality effects at the sentence level are less understood, especially in L2. The current study first scrutinized the effects of emotionality on L2 semantic processing in late proficient Chinese-English bilinguals. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read English passive sentences and performed a semantic judgment task. The same experimental sentences were displayed but negative, neutral, and positive verbs could be either semantically correct or incorrect within the sentence context. Overall, the results showed an effect of semantic correctness in the P2 time window, and effects of both semantic violation and word emotionality in the N400 time window, with no interaction between these two factors. Moreover, we also observed an effect of word emotionality in the LPC time window, which could be interpreted as standard emotion effects at the late processing stage. The present study provides new evidence for early semantic access and contextual integration during L2 sentence processing, and sheds light on the relation between conceptual and affective evaluation of meaningful information in L2 context.