Young learners' attitudes and motivation are important indicators of foreign language learning success and have thus attracted increasing attention over the last decades. As a large country where English is taught as a foreign language (EFL) and children generally start learning English at an early age, China provides an ideal context to study the attitudes and motivation of young EFL learners. Drawing upon the socio-educational model, this study surveyed 521 Chinese parents using an online questionnaire and interviewed eight of them to examine their perspectives on their children's attitudes and motivation towards EFL learning. The findings suggest that parental factors – socioeconomic status and parental involvement – influence young learners' EFL attitudes and motivation, as perceived by their parents. Parental factors, age at the onset of English language learning and intensity of exposure explained a significant amount of the variation in parents’ reports on the attitudes and motivation of young learners. Furthermore, the parents reported that their children's EFL attitudes and motivation were constantly changing, and that family, school and extracurricular training appeared to play different roles in this process of change.

Previous research suggests that emotion words elicit lower emotional reactivity in languages acquired later in life (LX), prompting bilinguals to make less emotional decisions when responding to emotionally charged moral dilemmas in the LX compared to their first language (L1). This study investigated the influence of word emotionality on bilinguals’ moral judgements by manipulating the degree of emotiveness of the moral questions (i.e., emotive versus neutral conditions) accompanying different types of moral dilemmas (i.e., personal/sacrificial versus impersonal/realistic). Mixed effects logistic regression models revealed that the use of the LX increased the number of utilitarian decisions in both the emotive and the neutral conditions but only in the sacrificial moral dilemmas. Moreover, the emotive questions led to more deontological moral judgements than the neutral questions but only in the L1. Taken together, these findings provide further insight into the impact of emotion on bilinguals’ moral decision-making.

Autobiographical memories (AMs) are partly influenced by people's ability to process and express their emotions. This study investigated the extent to which trait emotional intelligence (EI) contributed to the emotional vocabulary of 148 adolescents – 60 speakers of Spanish as a heritage language (HL) raised in Germany, 61 first-language (L1) German speakers and 27 L1 Spanish speakers – in their written AMs of anger and surprise. The results revealed that heritage speakers with high trait EI used more emotional words in their AMs. These bilinguals also used more positive, negative and high-arousal words in their HL and in their AMs of anger. Similar patterns were observed in the AMs produced in Spanish (HL and L1), but L1 Spanish speakers used more emotional words in their AMs of surprise. By contrast, L1 German speakers used more emotional words than bilinguals in their AMs in German, and AMs of anger in German included more emotional vocabulary than those addressing surprise events.