Cross-cultural Cognition and Bilingualism (5)

5. Conclusion (Limitation and Further Research)

The project proved the first hypothesis that swear taboo words are both expressed and perceived stronger in first language. It partially proved that love is expressed and expressed and perceived stronger in L1 for majority. But the data is not consistent with the part that acquisition age of L2 is an influential factor for love expression. It is also partially proved the third hypothesis that L1 is the first choice for majority to recall bad/difficult memory. Acquisition age and context of L2 have no strong influence on expressing and perceiving emotions.

There are some limitations of the project. The first one is that the questionnaire design is not structured well. 2 kinds of emotions were chose, including positive emotion (love) and negative emotion (S-T words and bad/difficult memory). The questions are comprehensive but not related to each other in depth. The second one is that some of the questions are confusing. For instance, even if with explanation of the ranking standard of L1 and L2 are the learning order, some participants still rank their languages according to the importance of the language to themselves. The third one is that samples are only 20, which is very limited. Meanwhile, participants have similar social background, which maybe lead to the homogeneity of the data. The last one is that participants are asked to self-rate their language proficiency. There is no measurement to test their self-rate proficiency is objective and neutral or not.

The future research could focus on finding out the factors influence people’s emotional language preference on endearment, swear-taboo words and bad/difficult memory recall.

(The author is an English teacher in Shanwei Polytechnic College, with her master degree of Media and Public Relations in Newcastle University. )