Effects of Speaker Emotional Facial Expression and Listener Age on Incremental Sentence Processing

Maria Nella Carminati,Pia Knoeferle,Piers Douglas Howe

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0072559

Maria Nella Carminati, Pia Knoeferle + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072559

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Sep 6, 2013
Citations: 99	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Bielefeld University

Abstract

We report two visual-world eye-tracking experiments that investigated how and with which time course emotional information from a speaker's face affects younger (N = 32, Mean age = 23) and older (N = 32, Mean age = 64) listeners’ visual attention and language comprehension as they processed emotional sentences in a visual context. The age manipulation tested predictions by socio-emotional selectivity theory of a positivity effect in older adults. After viewing the emotional face of a speaker (happy or sad) on a computer display, participants were presented simultaneously with two pictures depicting opposite-valence events (positive and negative; IAPS database) while they listened to a sentence referring to one of the events. Participants' eye fixations on the pictures while processing the sentence were increased when the speaker's face was (vs. wasn't) emotionally congruent with the sentence. The enhancement occurred from the early stages of referential disambiguation and was modulated by age. For the older adults it was more pronounced with positive faces, and for the younger ones with negative faces. These findings demonstrate for the first time that emotional facial expressions, similarly to previously-studied speaker cues such as eye gaze and gestures, are rapidly integrated into sentence processing. They also provide new evidence for positivity effects in older adults during situated sentence processing.

Highlights

The study of context effects on language processing has been a major research topic in psycholinguistics, and over the years findings in this area have influenced theories of language processing in an important way
Eye tracking results The eye tracking results provide evidence that emotion priming occurs during sentence processing: Participants’ looks to the relevant picture in the visual display were enhanced when the sentence was emotionally congruent with a preceding prime face
Taking as a starting point previous findings that priming from emotional faces occurs for words, we hypothesized that it might occur during incremental visually-situated sentence interpretation

Summary

Introduction

The study of context effects on language processing has been a major research topic in psycholinguistics, and over the years findings in this area have influenced theories of language processing in an important way. Current study: Emotion priming of sentences in young vs older adults To the extent that the just-mentioned findings on emotion priming from faces to words extend to visual attention and sentence processing, a smile on a speaker’s face should facilitate the processing of a positive sentence (compared to a negative sentence) on the part of the listener. A result where older people display reduced facilitation for negative sentences compared to younger people would be compatible with a positivity effect [50] These modulations by age can be predicted for face-sentence priming and face-picture priming in the eye-movement behavior, and for the verification response times and accuracy. As for possible age differences in the time course of the expected effects, older people may be as fast as the younger ones in responding to the face and sentence manipulation; alternatively, because of their age and concurrent cognitive decline, they may show a delay [72,73]

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General Discussion