Bilingualism is common amongst much of the world’s population, especially with the development of global networking. Depending on what language one feels comfortable in, the words that they use in emotional topics differ. Some people feel more comfortable talking about emotional topics in their second language because they feel more ‘distant’, therefore the whole idea is not as ‘real’, in comparison to their first language (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008). The emotionality experienced by a person also differs amongst their ability to speak a language, age when learning a language, as well as knowledge of the topic. (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008). This essay will discuss theories and psychological answers as to whether bilinguals second language is more distant than their first language, whilst exploring emotion through embarrassing issues (Bond and Lai, 1986), and a sentimental topic (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008).
(Bond and Lai, 1986) conducted an experiment to assess meaningfulness of each language to Cantonese-English bilinguals. The hypothesis was that people feel more embarrassed to discuss embarrassing topics in their first language because it is more meaningful to them, than their second language. The experiment consisted of 48 female participants, who were undergraduate psychology students at Hong Kong university. This is a limitation of the experiment as all participants were studying undergraduate degrees and were all female. Besides the fact that the results from this experiment cannot be generalised to someone from a western culture, the results also cannot apply to the overall Chinese population, due to the restricted sample. Given the fact that all the participants are psychology undergraduates is also a major limitation, as there is a likely chance of demand characteristics; due to a chance that the participants would have a perception of the aim of the experiment. Henceforth, participants may have acted a certain way to ensure that they are seen in a good light, or to please/displease the psychologist. This can contribute to inaccuracies of the findings of the experiment.
The experiment involved participants being paired up, each participant being assigned the role of the ‘interviewer’ and ‘interviewee’. This role was randomly assigned by tossing a coin, which was purely by chance; increasing the realism of the experiment (Bond and Lai, 1986). It is also an advantage that the psychologists weren’t the interviewers, as this has decreased the risk of investigator effects, for example asking leading questions. It was a structured interview where the ‘interviewer’ would ask 4 questions; 2 of which were on unembarrassing topics: the difference of education between two universities, and about the Hong Kong and US dollar. There were also two ‘embarrassing topic’ questions, which were: sexual attitudes of westerners and Chinese, and an embarrassing scene that happened in their lives. The level of ‘embarrassment’ was measured by the length of each answer. The questions were asked from embarrassing and unembarrassing topics so that the psychologist could compare the difference, after the interview was tape recorded.
The findings of the experiment showed participants were more likely to discuss ‘embarrassing topics’ in English, determined by the length of the answers of the participants. The numerical value for English spoken was .55 and Cantonese was spoken at .45 when talking about embarrassing topics. However, a major weakness of the study is the language ability and comfortability of each participant. Though each participant knew and studied basic English, not all participants were comfortable in the level of English that they spoke (Bond and Lai, 1986). Despite this, an advantage was that all participants had the exact same first and second language which allows space for comparison between each participant. In addition, the findings obtained from the experiment may be less accurate because it could be that the results were obtained as participants, felt like they were better at one language. This also comes hand in hand with an explanation mentioned in (Bond and Lai, 1986)’s article which suggests that it may be that participants didn’t disclose more in English regarding the embarrassing topics, but they were repeating what they said more often. Overall, (Bond and Lai, 1986)’s experiment concluded that the second language is in fact more emotionally distant than the first language, hence participants spoke more, and were more open to discuss embarrassing topics in English rather than their mother tongue; Cantonese.
The research of emotionality of the second language in comparison to the first language was studied by (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008). The prediction made was that when the immigration story is recalled in the second language, there would be more negative words used. (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008) aimed this experiment to analyse the number of emotional words used, whether positive emotions were used and whether the age of the participants after immigration were also relevant factors to how the participants recalled their story. It can immediately be noted that this experiment is more personal to oneself in comparison to (Bond and Lai, 1986)’s experiment. (Bond and Lai, 1986)’s experiment consisted of a person answering questions on embarrassing and unembarrassing topics, whereas (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008)’s experiment was about personal experience. Displaying that the results provided from (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008)’s experiment will have more mundane realism, and more accurate to people’s emotionality between two languages in real life. The experiment consisted of 47 Russian-English bilinguals, 23 males and 24 females. 10 participants said they preferred to recall the event in Russian, 11 had no language preference, the rest of the participants said they prefer to speak in English. This is an advantage of the experiment because participants were asked to recall the event depending on what language they felt most comfortable in; which could lead to a more intimate and detailed account. However, from analysing the language ability of all the participants, it was generally found that participants spoke better Russian than English. This supports the idea that, talking in second language is more meaningful than the first. It could be that some participants chose to speak in English to escape from the reality of their story (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008).
There was an unstructured interview with an interviewer who was competent in both languages. The benefit of using an unstructured interview, unlike the structured interview used in (Bond and Lai, 1986)’s experiment, was that participants were not restricted regarding recalling their experience, allowing participants to explore the full story and emotions that were experienced during their journey. The interview is subject to investigator bias for example smiling during the interview or demand characteristics. However, given the fact that this experiment was about real life experience, the extent of demand characteristics inaccuracies is lower.
The findings of (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008)’s experiment had a similar outcome to the findings found in Bond and Lai’s experiment. When a participant spoke in their preferred language, more negative emotions were used, thus showing the comfortability of language was important for recall. A disadvantage was the use of an independent groups design instead of repeated measures. The problem of individual differences occurs when it comes to the comparisons, for example someone may have had a negative journey to the US and would’ve used negative words when describing the experiment in English or in Russian. (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008)’s suggests some theories, such as it could be that participants chose to speak in English, to distance themselves from the reality of their immigration journey. Or it could be due to the difference between a collectivist and individualistic culture, hence participants are using a lot of negative words when recalling the journey in English, and feel like they could more open. Further limitations of the study is that memory could be distorted, which may have led some participants to see their immigration story from a more negative point of view, decreasing the findings accuracy, A further limitation is both are European languages, the results of emotionality within languages could also differ if different continental languages were examined. It would have increased generalisability if participants had different lengths of time in America to observe how their emotionality can affect the preferred language and recall. Overall, like (Bond and Lai, 1986)’s experiment; the second language is more emotionally distant from the first.
To conclude, the evidence found from both (Bond and Lai, 1986)’s and (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008)’s experiment shows that bilinguals are more emotionally distant to their second language than their first language. In (Bond and Lai, 1986)’s experiment participants felt more comfortable to speak about embarrassing topics in English rather than their native language Cantonese, because it doesn’t have as much as realism than speaking in Cantonese. The participants who preferred English, spoke with more negative words in (Viorica and Kaushanskaya, 2008)’s experiment. This could be because of more openness in an individualistic culture, or to distance themselves from the complete truth; emphasising the distance from emotion that is felt whilst talking in the second language. Both experiments, show it is likely that people do feel more emotionally distant in their second language than their first.