Abstract

SARLI, LETICIA  and  JUSTEL, NADIA. Acquisition and Retrieval of Emotional Words in Monolingual and Bilingual Populations. Rev. colomb. psicol. [online]. 2020, vol.29, n.2, pp.25-40.  Epub Oct 20, 2020. ISSN 0121-5469.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcp.v29n2.78445.

The term emotional memory refers to the particular effect where emotions influence memory formation. This effect is controversial for people who use a second language. This study aims to explore the relationship between memory and emotion on Spanish-English bilingual (BL) and monolingual (ML) adults through an emotional rating task and two memory tasks. The 49 participants (15 ML and 34 BL) encoded a wordlist in either Spanish (ML and BL) or English (BL) while reporting the valence and arousal ratings for each word. All groups took a free recall and recognition task for the list immediately and seven days after encoding. For those subjects who encoded the stimuli in Spanish (ML and BL), the words had a higher emotional load than the ones encoded them in English (BL). Furthermore, the ML-group presented more intrusions than both BL-groups. Particular forms of information processing could modulate memory retrieval on emotional memory for bilinguals and monolinguals.

Keywords : bilingualism; emotion; emotional memory; verbal memory.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )