Additional information

In the Scaling Task all five stories were of two types: stories presenting prototypical "envy situations"

Envy situation – situation where a person lacks another’s superior quality, achievement, opportunity, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it (Parrot & Smith, 1993).
[These description is very close to those in both Russian and English dictionaries].

, and stories, presenting prototypical "jealous situations".

Jealous situation – situation where a person fears losing an important relationship with another person to a rival (Parrot & Smith, 1993).
[These description is very close to those in both Russian and English dictionaries].

Russian version of the task consisted of the same situations translated into Russian. The corresponding terms (translation equivalents) are: “envious”-“zaviduet” and “jealous”-“revnuet”.
When presented with each story, you were asked to scale the appropriateness of words “envious”/"zaviduet" and “jealous”/“revnuet” to describe them. That is how you performed:

Envy Situations
Story 2, Story 3, Story 5

Jealousy Situations
Story 1,Story 4

Compare yourself with others' performance:

Envy Situations

Jealousy Situations

On the whole Russian speakers tend to apply term “zaviduet” only to “envy situations” and “revnuet” – only to “jealousy situation”. English speakers refer to “envy situations” with the both words (“envy” and “jealous”) almost equally, though still differentiating between their appropriateness in “jealousy situations”.

An interesting finding is that bilinguals performed in accordance with the language they were using in the experiment (either English or Russian). However, when using Russian in “envy situations” they performed though similarly to Russian monolinguals – but not exactly in the same way. In English they performed exactly as English monolinguals. Probably this is the awareness of overlapping concepts in English that influenced their performance? Probably they started to see jealousy and envy as something more similar? Let’s see your results for the second part of the experiment and try to answer these questions!

In the Sorting Task you were presented with triads of different situations. The experiment was intended to investigate whether the difference in how Russian and English speakers apply words “envious”/”zaviduet” and “jealous”/”revnuet” reflected a difference in conceptual perception of corresponding situations (do English speakers really see "envy" and "jealous" situations more similar and group them together"? Or is that just a matter of naming?). We were also interested if there is a conceptual shift in bilinguals’ mental lexicon, caused by the knowledge of L2.
Here you may see your results and compare them with the previously documented performance in different language group.

Triad Type	You grouped together	Target Answer
Triad Type	You grouped together	MR	BR	BE	EM
1.JJE		JJ - 88%	JJ - 64%	JJ - 79%	JJ - 91%
2.EEJ		EE - 74%	EE - 73%	EE - 70%	EE - 74%
3.JJN		JJ - 75%	JJ - 73%	JJ - 82%	JJ - 91%
4.EEN		EE - 77%	EE - 68%	EE - 82%	EE - 84%
5.EJN		EJ - 21%	EJ - 59%	EJ - 50%	EJ - 52%

*J - "jealous situation", E - "envy situation", N - situation of general negative nature / MR - Russian monolinguals, BR - Russian bilinguals that performed the test in Russian, BE - Russian bilinguals that performed the test in English, EM - English monolinguals.

All 4 documented groups of speakers performed very similarly in the first 4 triads. Subjects consistently differentiated between "envy" and "jealous" situations, regardless of their native language and a language that they were currently using. In the last triad, as we expected, English speakers were more likely to see envy and jealous emotions as similar, than Russian monolinguals (in fact 50% of BR saw the 3 situations as so different, that they couldn't provide any answer). The interesting finding is that "envy" and "jealous" situation seemed more alike not only to English monolinguals and Russian bilinguals, that performed the task in English, but also to bilinguals that used Russian. Judging by the performance in the 5th triad, we may differentiate between people that were and were not exposed to English (either as L1 or as L2).

Go to the ‘Read’ page to get a brief summary of the experiment and find out, what that tells us about bilingual mental lexicon and language interference!

Jealous	1 2 3 4 5 6
Upset	1 2 3 4 5 6
Glad	1 2 3 4 5 6
Surprised	1 2 3 4 5 6
Envious	1 2 3 4 5 6
Sad	1 2 3 4 5 6

Ревность	1 2 3 4 5 6
Расстройство	1 2 3 4 5 6
Радость	1 2 3 4 5 6
Удивление	1 2 3 4 5 6
Зависть	1 2 3 4 5 6
Грусть	1 2 3 4 5 6

Experiment 4: Part I (Scaling Task)

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