Affect-Language Interactions in Native and Non-Native English Speakers: A Neuropragmatic Perspective

207 Pages·2016·4.675 MB·

by  Rafał Jończyk (auth.)

The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series 4
Rafał  Jończyk
Affect-Language
Interactions in
Native and Non-
Native English
Speakers
A Neuropragmatic Perspective
The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series
Series Editors
Roberto R. Heredia
Anna B. Cieślicka
More information about this series at h ttp://www.springer.com/series/13841
ń
Rafał Jo czyk
Affect-Language Interactions
in Native and Non-Native
English Speakers
A Neuropragmatic Perspective
Rafał Jończyk
Faculty of English
Adam Mickiewicz University
Poznań , Poland
The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series
ISBN 978-3-319-47634-6 ISBN 978-3-319-47635-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47635-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959760
© Springer International Publishing AG 2016
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Książkę tę dedykuję pamięci ukochanej babci
Ewy.
I dedicate this book to the memory of my
beloved grandmother, Eve.
Pref ace
Communication is an arena of e xpression , exchange , and s haring of people’s
thoughts, opinions, beliefs, feelings, or attitudes. Two essential, interacting and
integral expressive agents in communication are affect (e.g. emotions, attitudes,
beliefs, moods) and language (its verbal and non-verbal manifestation). The rela-
tionship between affect and language is highly reciprocal. Affect fi nds an outlet
on all levels of non-verbal (e.g. gestures, body posture, facial expression) as well
as verbal (e.g. syntax, semantics, pragmatics) language. In turn, language has the
capacity to modify people’s affective states, e.g. by means of compliments,
insults, or poetry. Research on affect-language interactions in native speakers sup-
ports the special role of affective meaning in language comprehension. Affective
words and sentences attract more attention (Pratto & John, 1 991 ; Wentura,
Rothermund & Bak, 2 000) , elicit increased neurophysiological activity (Citron,
2012; Kissler, Assadollahi, & Herbert, 2 006) , and are remembered more vividly
(Adelman & Estes, 2 013 ; LaBar & Cabeza, 2 006 ) than non-affective (neutral)
language (Chap. 2 ).
I n today’s world, individuals’ communicative interactions are oftentimes con-
structed in and coloured by a multilingual context (Chap. 4 ). Indeed, it has been
estimated that more than half of the world population speaks more than one lan-
guage (Grosjean, 1 984 , 2 010 ). This situation required to revisit the relationship
between affect and language in communication, because an authentic representation
of communicative interactions will need to take into consideration the fi rst (L1) and
second (L2) language(s) of the interlocutors. Research into affect manifestation in
bilinguals’ languages has been growing rapidly over the last decade (cf., Dewaele,
2010; Pavlenko, 2 005 , 2 012) . Clinical reports showed that bilingual patients expe-
rienced affective detachment when discussing anxiety or taboo-related topics in
their L2 (Dewaele & Costa, 2 013 ; Marcos, 1 976 ; Schwanberg, 2 010 ). Also, L2 was
oftentimes construed as a vehicle for the discussion of otherwise too evocative
memories and experiences; L1, by contrast, as an open path to subconsciously
repressed, past memories that enabled their re-experience or “reliving” anew
(Aragno & Schlachet, 1 996 ). In non-clinical contexts, when bilinguals are asked
about their affective experiences in day-to-day interactions, L1 is often construed as
vii
viii Preface
the “language of the heart”, and L2 as being “affectively disembodied” (Pavlenko,
2005 , 2006 ).
In the search for behavioural and neurophysiological correlates of this phenom-
enon, however, cognitive and neurocognitive paradigms reported essentially no
measurable differences in the processing of affective meaning between L1 and L2
(e.g. Opitz & Degner, 2 012 ; Ponari et al., 2 015 ). This might seem surprising if one
recalls that one of the most prominent and infl uential psychologists, William James
(1 884 ), thought of affective experiences as arising from perceptions of physiologi-
cal reactions to a stimulus in the environment. In this view, differences in affective
experience in L1 and L2 reported in clinical and introspective studies (e.g. the feel-
ing of affective disembodiment in L2) would be expected to fi nd refl ection in dif-
ferential physiological reaction to affective information in L1 and L2 in cognitive
and psychophysiological studies.
T his book argues that the inconsistency in the reported fi ndings may arise from
the marginalisation of contextual information in cognitive and neurocognitive para-
digms. Clinical and introspective studies have relied on evidence collected in real-
world and authentic communicative contexts that foster natural affective interactions.
Cognitive and neurocognitive studies, by contrast, have exposed bilinguals to read-
ing single, decontextualized affective words in L1 and L2 in an unnatural and con-
trolled laboratory setting. While there is relatively little that can be done about the
laboratory context, it is essential that participants read natural contextualised affec-
tive language that may stimulate mental imagery and elicit genuine affective experi-
ences in a lab. So far, however, these studies followed a reductionist approach to
affective language and put the pragmatic aspect of communication in the shade.
T his book questions the reductionist view and fosters a pragmatic approach to
the investigation of affect-language interactions in both monolingual and bilingual
research. Its theoretical framework is an integration of psychological construction
(Barrett & Russell, 2 015; Chap. 1 ) and affective pragmatics’ (Caffi & Janney, 1994 ;
Janney, 1996; Kopytko, 2002; Chap. 3) views on affect and language. Its methodol-
ogy has its roots in monolingual and bilingual research in cognitive neuroscience
(Chwilla, Brown, & Hagoort, 1 995 ; Kutas & Federmeier, 2 011 ; Wu & Thierry,
2 012; Chaps. 2 – 4 ) and neuropragmatics (Van Berkum, 2 008 , 2 010 ; Van Berkum,
Holleman, Nieuwland, Otten, & Murre, 2 009 ; Chap. 3 ). Finally, its inspiration
comes from stimulating works by Aneta Pavlenko (2 005 , 2 006 ) and Jean-Marc
Dewaele (2 010 ; Chap. 4 ). By combining conceptual understanding and method-
ological expertise from many disciplines, the current manuscript aims to provide a
comprehensive picture of the dynamic interactions between contextual and affec-
tive information in the language domain. Empirically, this is achieved by means of
two electrophysiological (EEG) experiments that investigate how the build-up of
contextual information might modulate behavioural and electrophysiological
(EEG) responses to affective words in the L1 and L2 of profi cient Polish-English
bilinguals immersed in the L2 culture (Chap. 5 ) . In what follows, I present the
scope of the book.
Chapter 1 discusses the theoretical views on affect and emotion, supported by
empirical evidence. It presents a historical perspective on the concept of emotion,
Preface ix
demonstrating how its understanding has been shaped over the past century. Here,
the mainstream models of emotion are discussed along with their critical evaluation,
i.e. the b asic emotion model (Ekman, 1 994 ; Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1 969 ),
the a ppraisal model (Arnold, 1960 ; Clore & Ortony, 2008 ; Lazarus, 1991 ), and the
psychological construction model (Barrett, 2 011 ; Barrett & Russell, 2015 ; Russell,
2 012) . Particular attention is devoted to the premises of the psychological construc-
tion model and the concept of core affect that provide the theoretical foundation for
the present investigation. Chapter 1 also addresses the heated debate about affect
primacy over cognition (Lazarus, 1 984 ; Zajonc, 1 984 ) and presents evidence dem-
onstrating a crucial role of basic affective evaluations in our everyday lives. The
fi nal section of Chapter 1 illustrates the brain’s widespread and multimodal activa-
tion to affective meaning.
Chapters 2 and 3 present two distinct approaches to the investigation of affect-
language interactions in monolingual speakers. Chapter 2 illustrates the reductionist
perspective, by reviewing recent behavioural and neuroimaging evidence demon-
strating profound infl uence of affective information on single word recognition and
naming. The review is followed by a discussion of the main concerns about the
reductionist investigation of affective language. Chapter 3 introduces the pragmatic
perspective on affect-language interactions. This chapter begins with a theoretical
foundation of cognitive and affective pragmatics and follows with an empirical
review of neuropragmatic studies that looked into linguistic and socio-personal con-
text effects on affective word processing. The main message that emerges from the
two chapters is that a better understanding of the mechanisms governing the mani-
festation of affective language in communication requires a more pragmatic
approach to be implemented in a laboratory context.
Chapter 4 builds on the discussion on affect-language interface from Chaps. 2
and 3 , but—importantly—it extends it to a bilingual context. It provides a critical
review of a wide array of studies investigating affective repertoires of bilingual
speakers in different contexts (e.g. clinical, introspective, cognitive) and using dif-
ferent measures (e.g. interviews, self-reports, reaction times, event-related poten-
tials). As already mentioned, this chapter brings to the fore the discrepancy between
fi ndings reported in qualitative (introspective, clinical) and quantitative (cognitive,
neurocognitive) research on bilingualism and affect. In a similar vein to Chap. 2 ,
this inconsistency is thought to stem from the implementation of decontextualized
and unnatural stimuli in quantitative research.
Chapter 5 fi lls in this gap by describing two electrophysiological experiments
that investigate affective language in minimal (word pairs, experiment 1) and rich
(sentences, experiment 2) context conditions in English monolingual and Polish-
English bilingual individuals. Due to the fact that a full methodological description
of experiment 2 may be found elsewhere (Jończyk, Boutonnet, Musiał, Hoemann,
& Thierry, 2 016 ), Chap. 5 concentrates on its key assumptions and fi ndings that are
important in the context of the present investigation. The experiments constitute the
fi rst attempt to directly investigate the impact of a build-up of contextual informa-
tion on the processing of the same set of affective words in the bilinguals’ respective
languages. This “pragmatic twist” enabled to reveal a differential modulation of
x Preface
electrophysiological responses to affective sentences, but not word pairs, in L1 and
L2. Specifi cally, access to negative information in the L2 was found to be sup-
pressed at the very early stages of processing or processed very superfi cially—as if
it was deprived of affective value. This offers the fi rst neurocognitive interpreta-
tional framework for fi ndings reported in clinical and introspective studies and dem-
onstrates that the richness of context may boost affective experience.
F inally, Chaps. 6 and 7 discuss the empirical fi ndings, each from a slightly dif-
ferent perspective. Chapter 6 provides the general discussion and explanation of the
results and relates them to monolingual and bilingual literature. Particularly, the
empirical fi ndings are discussed within the framework of r epression mechanism
(Jończyk et al., 2 016 ; Wu & Thierry, 2012 ) affective anticipation (Bar, 2007 , 2 009 ;
Van Berkum, 2 010) , and n europragmatics (Van Berkum, 2 010 , 2 013 ). Also, this
chapter discusses potential implications of the fi ndings for bilingual models of lexi-
cal access and decision-making in bilinguals. Chapter 7, on the other hand, consti-
tutes a short discussion that addresses the hypothesis of affective disembodiment in
L2 (Pavlenko, 2 005 , 2 012) . It contains a review of evidence demonstrating that
semantic and affective meaning are grounded in the perceptual, somatosensory,
motor, and introspective experiences. This situation, however, seems to differ for
bilinguals, for whom these experiences might not be readily available when operat-
ing in their L2. This disembodied view of affective language in bilingualism is dis-
cussed and related to the available evidence in the fi eld of bilingualism in general,
and the current study in particular.
Poznań, Poland Rafał Jończyk
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