The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, showed that people have a greater reaction to emotional words and phrases in their native (first) language. This is further proven by the fact that people speak to their infants and children in their first language despite living in a country which speaks another language and despite fluency in the second.
MedicalXpress.com reported that previous research has shown that emotion affects basic brain functions such as attention, memory and motor skills but this new research suggests that it also affects higher brain processing functions like language and understanding.