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Abstract
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Language makes up an essential part of social life. People need language to communicate and express their thoughts and beliefs. Hence, acquiring more than one language, partly due to the globalization that the world is facing nowadays, has been construed as an asset for individuals to share experiences, thoughts, beliefs and ideas with people in other parts of the world. Taking this point into account that we use language to express our thoughts and beliefs, we would realize that emotional language constitutes an enormous part of our language on a daily basis. (Altarriba., 2014). Hence, emotional lexicons of L1 and L2 has been an interestingly complicated case for studies over the last decade. Several studies have been carried out on emotional word processing of bilinguals, and the results have been somewhat inconsistent both in L1 and L2. In some studies the emotional content of the words was advantageous regarding the lexical processing either in L1 or L2, sometimes in both and sometimes no differences were observed. Although some of these results were justified by factors like age of acquisition and context of learning, the need for further research and taking other factors into account might contribute to our better understanding of bilinguals’ lexical processing. Furthermore, as it’s suggested, bilingualism affects emotion word processing (Pavlenko., 2004). One point is the conceptual differences established by different cultures. In other words, individualistic and collective cultures influence the responses to the same emotion words (Pavlenko., 2008). This can itself be a further proof that emotion word processing needs to be carried out in different languages of different cultures to better provide an insightful platform for the future studies. In the literature of emotional word processing, words have been rarely studied in real texts; however, outside the laboratory words seldom occur alone accompanied by tasks such as lexical decision or categorization. H
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