Experimental studies of emotional word processing in L1 and L2 in bilinguals: a review

Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 2026.

Kulikova E.

This article is a review of contemporary experimental research on the processing of emotional verbal stimuli in bilinguals. The aim of the work is to describe the key factors that determine differences in the processing speed of emotional words depending on their valence and the language of presentation (the bilingual's L1 or L2). The relevance of the study is driven by the growing interest in the role of emotions in language processing and the lack of a unified theoretical framework, which is linked to the significant diversity of experimental paradigms and stimulus materials used in the research of emotional processing. The article examines key aspects of the problem. The first part is devoted to describing the experimental methodologies used in this field, such as the lexical decision task, affective categorization task, emotional Stroop test, as well as eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) methods, which allow for the recording of physiological correlates of stimulus processing. The second part summarizes results of the research focused on emotional processing in monolinguals: it discusses the influence of valence (positive/negative) and word type (emotion-label or emotion-laden) on processing speed, as well as the interaction of these factors with other psycholinguistic variables, such as frequency and concreteness of the word. Finally, the third part examines the factors influencing the processing of emotional vocabulary in bilinguals.

Keywords: эмоции, bilingualism, билингвизм, emotions, emotional stimulus, время реакции, экспериментальные методы, reaction time, experimental methods, эмоциональный стимул, обработка эмоциональной лексики, emotional word processing