Understanding Love in the L1 and the Additional Language: Evidence from Semantic Fluency and Graph Analysis

This study explores how adolescent learners conceptualize the emotion of love in their first language (Spanish) and in English as a foreign language (EFL), comparing monolingual Spanish speakers and Spanish-Arabic bilinguals. A total of 66 participants (33 per group), all with A2 proficiency in English, completed a semantic fluency task in both Spanish and English, producing as many words as possible in relation to the prompts Amor and Love. The data were analyzed using graph theory to capture the organization of participants' emotion lexicons. The results show that love is a highly productive and cohesive semantic field, eliciting significantly more responses in L1 than in L2, for both Spanish-only (t = -8.866, <i>p</i> < 0.001) and Spanish-Arabic (W = 101.0, <i>p</i> = 0.001) participants. The differences between the two learner cohorts were not significant in Spanish nor in English. The results from the graph analyses revealed that learners displayed rich and strongly connected networks in Spanish, with learners with a migration origin showing slightly more fragmented networks. In English, both groups performed similarly, with responses probably mediated by L1 translation equivalents and metaphorical associations (e.g., <i>heart</i>, <i>flower</i>, and <i>red</i>). The findings suggest that emotional lexicons are better developed and more efficiently organized in the L1, whereas FL representations are shaped by proficiency, context of learning, and reliance on L1 conceptual structures. This study contributes novel insights into bilingual and heritage learners' emotional conceptualization and highlights the value of graph analysis for examining the structure of emotion words.