"It's the same, but it's not": emotion concepts in simultaneous bilinguals.

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2023-08-11

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en

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Abstract

Simultaneous bilinguals have often been overlooked in research into bilingualism and emotions, as the focus has usually been on late or sequential bilinguals (Pavlenko, 2008; Wickham, 2019). If a study did include simultaneous bilinguals, not often was the focus on emotion conceptualisation, as it was on the expression of emotions for example (Wickham, 2019). The current study aims to understand how simultaneous bilinguals conceptualise their emotions, by means of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. It was found that the participants were generally influenced by their interlocutor, the context, their proficiency, and their upbringing regarding their language use. Furthermore, many emotion concepts in one of their first languages were similar to those in their other first language. However, there were exceptions where emotion words or concepts were untranslatable to the other first language. In the future, it would be interesting to conduct research onto more simultaneous bilinguals and their emotion concepts.

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