The purpose of the study was to gain an in-depth understanding of the emotional expression in the narration of autobiographical stories of Chinese international students in their respective languages (i.e., Mandarin and English). It addressed the methodological limitations of previous research on bilinguals' emotional expression and autobiographical memory recall. A phenomenological approach with Conversation Analysis was used to examine the bilingual lived experience of 8 graduate students from mainland China through an individual 60-minute bilingual semi-structured interview. The participants were asked to share stories before and after their arrival in the United States, as well as to self-reflect on their use of their respective languages during the interview and in their daily life. Several strategies were employed to establish four areas of trustworthiness in the qualitative data. Four major themes and related sub-themes emerged from the bilingual interview data including Mandarin as the Base Language, Affective Repertories of Mandarin (Use of Chinese Idioms and Proverbs, Use of Analogy, and Use of Repetition), Code-Switching as an Additional Communication Resource (Mixed Attitudes Towards Code-Switching, Non-Affective Functions of Code-Switching, and Affective Functions of Code-Switching), and Emotional Representation of the Bilingual Self (Open versus Reserved and Formal versus Casual). Finally, research limitations, future directions, and implications for bilingual counseling are discussed.

The last decades have witnessed the resurgence of research on linguistic relativity, which provides empirical evidence of possible language effects on thought across various perceptual domains. This study investigated the linguistic relativity hypothesis in the abstract domain of time by looking at how L1 Chinese - L2 English bilinguals conceptualize time in two-dimensional space. English primarily relies on horizontal spatial items to talk about time (e.g., back to youth); in addition to horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., ‘front year’), Chinese speakers also commonly use vertical metaphors to describe time (e.g., ‘up week’). If language has an effect on thought, then spatial-temporal metaphors should shape people’s temporal cognition. In this study, we examined whether spatial-temporal metaphors impact online processing of time and long-term habitual thinking about time. Experiment 1 showed that bilinguals could automatically access the timeline which corresponded to the immediate linguistic context. In Experiment 2, a majority of bilinguals demonstrated salient vertical bias for temporal reasoning, whereas a small number of participants relied on the horizontal axis to represent time. The dominant thinking patterns for time documented here (65% prefer a vertical representation of time; 35% horizontal) run counter to the fact that horizontal metaphors are twice as common in Chinese as vertical metaphors. Further, it was found that bilinguals who used English more frequently were more likely to have a less vertical bias, which suggested a role of L2 experience in conceptual representations. Taken together, the evidence in this study showed that spatial-temporal metaphors have both short-term and long-term effects on mental representations of time, but also that space-time mappings do not depend solely on linguistic factors.

La présente étude a examiné si les équivalents traductionnels en français ou en anglais des constituants des mots composés chinois peuvent influencer la reconnaissance des composés chinois et, si oui, s’ils affectent ce processus de la même manière. Nous avons mené une expérience d’amorçage par répétition du constituant, où les cibles étaient des mots composés chinois bimorphémiques, précédés d’un de leurs constituants ou d’un stimulus non relié. Des bilingues chinois-français et chinois-anglais ont été assignés à trois conditions d’amorçage, où les amorces étaient traduites dans leur L2 (français ou anglais) ou répétées en L1 (chinois, transcrit en pinyin). Les résultats des conditions d’amorçage en L2 révèlent que les participants reconnaissaient les mots composés chinois comme de vrais mots significativement plus rapidement lorsqu’ils étaient précédés d’un de leurs constituants, en français ou en anglais, que lorsqu’ils étaient précédés d’un stimulus non relié. Cet effet n’est pas limité à une L2 spécifique, puisque les effets d’amorçage des constituants provoqués par les amorces en français et en anglais ont partagé le même patron. Nous n’avons pas trouvé d’effet d’amorçage par répétition d’un constituant en chinois, ce qui pourrait être dû à la difficulté à traiter le pinyin. Nous proposons que l’effet d’amorçage par répétition du constituant en L2 sur le traitement des mots composés chinois appuie l’hypothèse d’un lexique mental bilingue intégré caractérisé par une connectivité au niveau non seulement lexicale, mais aussi infralexicale. / The present study investigated whether the French or English translation equivalents of Chinese compound constituents affect Chinese compound recognition and, if so, whether they affect processing in a comparable manner. We conducted a constituent priming experiment, where targets were bimorphemic Chinese compounds, preceded by one of their constituents or an unrelated item. Chinese-French and Chinese-English bilinguals were assigned to three priming conditions, where primes were translated into their L2 French or L2 English or repeated in their L1 Chinese (transcribed as Pinyin syllables). Results from the L2 priming conditions indicated that participants recognized Chinese compounds as real words significantly faster when they were preceded by one of their constituents, in either French or English, than they were when preceded by an unrelated stimulus. This effect was not restricted to a particular L2, as constituent priming effects produced by French primes patterned with English primes. We failed to find a significant constituent priming effect in the L1 priming condition, possibly due to difficulty in processing Pinyin. We argue that the L2 constituent priming effects on Chinese compound processing provide evidence in favour of an integrated bilingual mental lexicon characterized by lexical as well as sublexical connectivity.