The Role of Gender in Cognitive Processing of Affective Linguistic Stimuli in Bilinguals

This study aims to compare the emotional reactions of bilingual men and women to affective valence by manipulating positive and negative linguistic stimuli. To achieve this aim, the semantic decision task was used. 56 Persian-English bilinguals, who were divided into two equal groups considering their gender (28 female and 28 male), were asked to decide whether the adjectives loaded with positive or negative valence (i.e., target words) were related in meaning to the preceding nouns (i.e., prime words). In order to find out whether there is any potential interaction between the valence of primes and targets, mixed factorial repeated measure ANOVA was run on reaction time and error rate data. The results of the present study on cognitive gender differences show that males and females, despite some few differences, generally follow a similar pattern in processing affective meaning of words in their second language.