The current research suggests that L2 learning does affect L2 learners' cognition of color and color-related emotional expressions.
Based on Linguistic relativity theory, Pavlenko (2014) pointed out L2 learners may have to modify mental representations of emotion categories and patterns of cognitive appraisal. In English and Chinese, blue and red have different metaphorical expressions and emotional meanings. Feeling blue and seeing red are typical of English to express depression and anger, which don’t exist in Chinese. Meanwhile, English speaking participants mostly consider blue and red as negative emotions but Chinese participants think them positive. However, whether L2 learning affects Chinese EFL learners’ cognition of color and color-related expressions remains unanswered. The present study is intended to address this issue. Questionnaires and priming paradigms were adopted to analyze what emotions highly proficient Chinese EFL learners, less proficient Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers would think of blue and red in both explicit and implicit ways. 61 Highly proficient Chinese EFL learners and 60 less proficient Chinese EFL learners participated in present research. Data collected from 21 native English speakers was used as a baseline. The results show that red in both color block and color term mostly elicits more negative emotions, especially anger in highly proficient Chinese EFL learners than in less proficient Chinese EFL learners. Blue, specifically in color term, arouses both positive and negative emotions in highly proficient Chinese EFL learners than in less proficient Chinese EFL learners. The results in present research shed some light on the study of L2 learners’ cognition, in which with a high language proficiency of second language, participants are more likely to think in a native English way, and Chinese EFL learners mostly think of red as negative and blue as both positive and negative in this case. Thus a conclusion can be made that L2 learning does in some way shape L2 learners’ cognition of color and color terms.
