How distracting are negative emotion words compared to semantically related words: Evidence from a translation recognition task.
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2021-07-15
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en
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Translation tasks typically find interference effects for translation pairs that are semantically related or form-related. For other word types, such as concrete and abstract words, differences have been reported where participants are generally faster to recognize translation pairs that involve concrete words. Likewise, negative emotion words have been found to be processed differently but have not been investigated in the context of a translation recognition task. The main aim of this thesis was to investigate how the concepts of negative emotion words as distractors influence the performance on a translation recognition task compared to semantically related translation pairs. Secondly, it was explored how the English proficiency of Dutch-English bilinguals affected their performance. A backward L2-L1 translation recognition paradigm was used that involved correct and incorrect translation pairs. The participants were native speakers of Dutch who learned English as their L2. It was the participants’ task to decide whether a translation pair was correct or incorrect. The incorrect translation pairs were of interest, because they consisted of semantically related translations or semantically unrelated translation with neutral valence, or negative emotion words. It was expected that the semantically related pairs and negative emotion pairs elicited interference of similar magnitude in the response times compared to the unrelated neutral translation pairs. The study’s findings reveal that participants were in reality slower to reject semantically related translation pairs than unrelated pairs. The negative emotion translation pairs revealed no significant effect in comparison to translation pairs in the neutral control condition, so it can be concluded that a connection between two translations is more distracting than the emotionality of a word. It seems, however, that negative emotion words were processed slightly faster than neutral words, but more research is needed on this for a conclusive answer. The participants did not appear to differ in accuracy for the different translation pairs. The participants had varying English proficiency scores, which was expected to influence the translation performance. The results show that English language proficiency did not affect how fast or accurate the participants responded to certain translation pairs. Despite not finding many significant results, the current thesis could provide a good starting point for future studies combining a translation recognition task with emotional stimuli.
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Faculteit der Letteren