Same Anxiety, Different Faces: Shared Mechanisms with Distinct Manifestations in Native and Non-native Speech

Anxiety during speech production is often presumed to differ between native (L1) and non-native (L2) contexts. This study challenges this dichotomy by integrating real-time psychophysiological measures, continuous self-reports, and dynamic systems modeling in 40 Dutch-English bilinguals delivering L1/L2 monologues. Results revealed that anxiety manifests as brief episodes (1-4 seconds) in both L1 and L2 contexts, with gradual physiological adaptation over time. While L2 speech intensified physical stress responses and delayed return to baseline compared to L1, time-varying and multi-level vector autoregressive models demonstrated statistically indistinguishable core mechanisms between conditions when averaged over time, differing only in intensity and temporal dynamics. Findings reframe "foreign language anxiety" as a contextually heightened manifestation of universal anxiety processes rather than a distinct entity. The study underscores anxiety’s fluidity as a dynamic system shaped by situational demands, offering methodological and theoretical advances for psycholinguistics and affective science.