QUANTITATIVE SURVEY RESULTS
Our survey asked participants to rate on a Likert scale their emotional perceptions of each language they speak. The 5 emotions we focused on were Different, Emotional, Fake, Logical, and Serious.
PARTICIPANTS' PERCEPTIONS OF FEELINGS IN HERITAGE VERSUS NON-HERITAGE LANGUAGES
The most notable differences are for participants’ feelings that their languages are “Emotional” and “Fake.” Paired two-tailed t-tests showed that the difference of means for heritage languages versus non-heritage languages was significant for “Emotional” (p=0.000987) and for “Fake” (p=0.000347), N=90.
PARTICIPANTS' PERCEPTIONS OF FEELINGS IN LANGUAGES LEARNED NATURALISTICALLY VERSUS INSTRUCTED
Similar to the observed effects when organizing data by heritage vs. nonheritage language, when organizing data by languages learned naturalistically vs. instructed, results were also significant for "Emotional" and "Fake." Paired T-tests showed that the difference in means for participants feeling fake in languages learned naturally versus languages learned by instruction was significant for participants feeling “Emotional” (p=0.000000282) and “Fake” (p=0.000376), N=90.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Statistical results showed significant differences in participants feeling "Emotional" and "Fake" in their heritage vs. nonheritage languages, but not significant differences for participants feeling "Serious," "Logical," and "Different." However, during the qualitative portion of the survey, many participants did report feeling different in different languages in their short answer responses. For more information on this, please see our Qualitative Results section. Future research is needed to explain why participants report feeling "Different" in different languages for the qualitative portion of the survey, but not in the quantitative portion.