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

Anxiety during speech is often assumed to differ in type between native (L1) and non-native (L2) language use. We combined continuous self-reports with high-resolution cardiac and electrodermal recordings in 40 Dutch–English bilingual adults who delivered 4-min monologues in both languages, followed by second-by-second replay ratings of felt anxiety and self-perceived proficiency. Across conditions, anxiety emerged as brief episodes (typically 1–4 s) superimposed on slower physiological adaptation. L2 speech elicited higher and more sustained autonomic arousal and a delayed return to baseline relative to L1. However, time-varying and multilevel vector autoregressive models showed that the core psychophysiological network linking felt anxiety, perceived proficiency and physiology was statistically indistinguishable across languages. What is commonly labelled ‘foreign language anxiety’ therefore reflects a context-intensified expression of a shared anxiety mechanism rather than a distinct construct. By mapping second-scale trajectories of subjective and physiological states during naturalistic speech, our findings highlight anxiety as a fluid dynamic system that adapts over tens of seconds yet is built from much shorter micro-episodes. This dynamic, multimodal approach offers a template for probing how contextual demands shape common affective mechanisms in communication across domains.