A Study on the Emotional Representation of Negation in Portuguese and Chinese among African Multilinguals

This study investigates the processing differences of emotional representation of negation between Portuguese and Chinese among African multilingual speakers, with a focus on the joint moderating effect of language type and language proficiency on negation processing. We recruited 60 quadrilingual speakers from African Portuguese-speaking countries, and conducted a lexical decision task based on the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP). The experiment adopted a 2 (language type: Portuguese/Chinese) × 2 (prime polarity: affirmative/negative) × 2 (target valence: positive/negative) with-in-subject design. Results revealed a stable negative bias effect: the correct recognition rate of negative target words under negative priming conditions was significantly higher than that under affirmative priming conditions, and this pattern was consistently observed in both languages. Both language type and prime polarity showed significant main effects, with a significant three-way interaction among language type, prime polarity and target valence. Portuguese showed a stronger negation processing effect than Chinese, and Chinese proficiency (HSK level) significantly moderated the strength of the negation effect in Chinese context. The study suggests that the core mechanism of negative emotional representation involves cognitive inhibition and prioritized cognitive resource allocation, rather than mere emotional valence effects. Language proficiency and language typology jointly modulate the negative emotional representation process in multilingual speakers.