Subjective and Objective Factors of Bilingualism in the Emotional Text Comprehension in Tuvan-Russian Bilinguals

Abstract

This psycholinguistic experiment included emotional rendering of Russian Internet texts by Tuvan-Russian bilinguals. It was based on the Bilingual Language Profile questionnaire and an authentic interface for non-discrete emotional text rendering. The research involved 65 Tuvan-Russian bilinguals and five texts previously classified by Russian monolinguals as "angry texts". All the participants fulfilled a bilingualism questionnaire prior to the test and were divided into three groups: 1) bilinguals with the dominant Tuvan language, 2) bilinguals with the dominant Russian language, and 3) balanced TuvanRussian bilinguals. The research examined the effect of subjective and objective factors of bilingualism on the comprehension of anger in these three groups of informants. The methodology included the method of psycholinguistic experiment and various methods of statistical analysis, e.g., Student’s t-test, Mann-Whitney U-test, etc. The research refuted the hypothesis about the effect of objective (age, context, communicative activity) or subjective (competence, language ratio) factors in TuvanRussian bilinguals on the emotional comprehension of Russian texts. The emotional text comprehension appeared to depend on the dominant language.

Keywords

• bilingualism
• anger
• internet texts
• psycholinguistic experiment
• tuvan language
• emotional text analysis