Emotional Vocabulary in Oral Production of Migrant Learners of Spanish

Abstract

The present study analysed the emotional vocabulary in oral production of a group of adult migrant learners of Spanish. The main results were as follows: (a) almost one third of the discourse of these migrants consisted of emotional words, especially positive ones; (b) length of stay in Spain correlated positively with the number of tokens and types (both total and lexical), as well as with the number of negative emotional tokens used by the participants; (c) younger participants achieved a greater degree of linguistic accuracy; (d) a higher communicative competence in Spanish was positively linked to the production of more emotional words.