Do Spanish as a foreign language users perceive emotional language the same way as native speakers? Valence and arousal of literal and figurative expressions Valencia y activación en expresiones literales y figuradas
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Abstract
Valence (how positive or negative a stimulus is) and arousal (the intensity with which a stimulus is received) have been recognized as the two main axes that articulate the affective component. On the other hand, it is known that the language of emotion is highly figurative and that the emotional component that words have in L1 compared to that of the languages that are learned later is not the same. The objective of this study is to compare the way in which natives and non-natives perceive emotional language in terms of valence and arousal and if there are differences between figurative and literal language. To this end, a total of 62 informants (users of Spanish as L1 and Chinese users of Spanish as LX) were surveyed about their perception of literal words and their figurative equivalents. Our results show that the figurative items generate more arousal than the literal ones in both groups and that the arousal before the stimuli is higher in L1 than in L2.
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Funding data
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Agencia Estatal de Investigación
Grant numbers FFI2017-83166-C2-2-R