Balanced bilingualism: A cognitive advantage in emotional words processing‎

The impact of bilingualism on cognitive and emotional processing is the topic of recent psycholinguists & Educational Psychologists’ studies. Bilingualism researchers (Harris, 2020; Kazanas & Altarriba, 2015; Pavlenko, 2012; and Ayçiçegi & Harris, 2004) believe the first language is more emotional than the 2nd Language in bilinguals. Iranian studies (Bahrami et al., 2020)also approved this. However, this research shall evaluate the formation of early Mental Emotion Lexicon in adult balanced bilinguals and the impact of positive emotions on lexical access as cognitive executive functions.‎ To evaluate the hypothesis through the experiment, forty ‏Turkish-Persian bilingual students with an average age ‎of ‎‏22-30‏‎ , SD=2.25, were selected from Islamic Azad ‎University students in Tehran to participate ‎in this quasi-experimental research. Participants were asked to complete the Bilingual History Questionnaire, the General ‎Health Questionnaire, the Positive and Negative affect schedule, and a ‎DMDX word selection task to induce positive emotion/word. The emotion words list from WEAL (Word Emotion Association Lexicon) was ‎validated under translation advantage. Repeated measures in ANOVA revealed that the participants’ ‎significantly‎ spent fast reaction time determining both languages’ emotion words to images, ‎induced with intense ‎positive emotion. The results showed that positive emotion processing ‎facilitates the RT more than inhibitory (negative) emotions in bilinguals. Early formation of a bilingual emotion lexicon causes balance in emotional distance. These approve the findings of ‎previous studies. ‎The results can be further referred to as literature on bilingualism cognitive advantage studies and propose mental emotion lexicon as criteria for bilingual ‎proficiency assessments.