Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Behav. Neurosci.
Sec. Emotion Regulation and Processing
Volume 18 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2024.1392005
This article is part of the Research Topic Emotions in Neuroscience: Fundamentals and New Discoveries View all 8 articles

Neurocognitive mechanisms of emotional interference in native and foreign languages: Evidence from proficient bilinguals

Provisionally accepted
Nicola Del Maschio Nicola Del Maschio 1Simone Sulpizio Simone Sulpizio 2Camilla Bellini Camilla Bellini 3Gianpaolo Del Mauro Gianpaolo Del Mauro 4matteo giannachi matteo giannachi 3duygu buga duygu buga 3davide fedeli davide fedeli 5Daniela Perani Daniela Perani 6Jubin Abutalebi Jubin Abutalebi 3,7*
  • 1 Faculty of Psychology, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy
  • 2 Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milano, Lombardy, Italy
  • 3 Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Lombardy, Italy
  • 4 School of Medicine, University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
  • 5 IRCCS Carlo Besta Neurological Institute Foundation, Milan, Lombardy, Italy
  • 6 Department of Nuclear Medicine, San Raffaele Scientific Institute (IRCCS), Milan, Lombardy, Italy
  • 7 UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Troms, Norway

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Currently available data show mixed results as to whether the processing of emotional information has the same characteristics in the native (L1) as in the second language (L2) of bilinguals. We conducted an fMRI experiment to shed light on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying bilinguals' emotional processing in L1 and L2 during an emotional interference task (i.e., the Emotional Stroop Task -EST). Our sample comprised proficient Italian-English bilinguals who learned their L2 during childhood mainly in instructional rather than immersive contexts. In spite of no detectable behavioural effects, we found stronger brain activations for L1 versus L2 emotional words in sectors of the posteromedial cortex involved in attention modulation, episodic memory, and affective processing. While fMRI findings are consistent with the hypothesis of a stronger emotional resonance when processing words in a native language, our overall pattern of results points to the different sensitivity of behavioural and hemodynamic responses to emotional information in the two languages of bilingual speakers.

    Keywords: bilingualism, Emotional Stroop, fMRI, cognitive control, emotion, implicit word processing

    Received: 26 Feb 2024; Accepted: 25 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Del Maschio, Sulpizio, Bellini, Del Mauro, giannachi, buga, fedeli, Perani and Abutalebi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jubin Abutalebi, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, 9019, Troms, Norway

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.