Impact of Bilingualism on Emotion Perception

Abstract

Bilingualism can affect people’s emotion perception and cognition. By assigning emotion priming tasks, emotion recognizing ability of bilingual people can be compared to monolingual people to indicate the difference of language dominance of the two populations. In our study, it is hypothesized that learning a second language can cause a shift of language dominance from the mother language (Chinese) to the second language (English). Also, we propose that bilingual speaker with a higher fluency or extrovert personalities in L2 will develop more ability in perceiving emotions in the second language. Moreover, defamiliarization of first language can also happen while switching language dominance.