Abstract
The emotional properties of words, such as valence and arousal, influence the way we perceive and process verbal stimuli. Recently, subjective significance was found to be an additional factor describing the activational aspect of emotional reactions, which is vital for the cognitive consequences of emotional stimuli processing. Subjective significance represents the form of mental activation specific to reflective mind processing. The Lexical Decision Task (LDT) is a paradigm allowing the investigation of the involuntary processing of meaning and differentiating this processing from the formal processing of the perceptual features of words. In this study, we wanted to search for the consequences of valence, arousal, and subjective significance for the involuntary processing of verbal stimuli meaning indexed by both behavioral measures (reaction latencies) and electrophysiological measures (Event-Related Potentials: ERPs). We expected subjective significance, as the reflective form of activation, to shorten response latencies in LDT. We also expected subjective significance to modulate the amplitude of the ERP FN400 component, reducing the negative-going deflection of the potential. We expected valence to shape the LPC component amplitude, differentiating between negative and positive valences, since the LPC indexes the meaning processing. Indeed, the results confirmed our expectations and showed that subjective significance is a factor independent from the arousal and valence that shapes the involuntary processing of verbal stimuli, especially the detection of a link between stimulus and meaning indexed by the FN400. Moreover, we found that the LPC amplitude was differentiated by valence level.
Highlights
The way we reach the understanding of written words is a crucial issue in explaining how language is processed
In the region of interest (ROI), we based our selection on two instances: (1) the ROIs were supposed to be analogical to those selected in our earlier study (Imbir et al Lexical Decision Task (LDT)), and (2) the ROIs were supposed to correspond to the classical components identified as being susceptible to the emotional meaning of stimuli in LDT, i.e., early posterior negativity (EPN), FN400, or Late Positive Complex (LPC)
For the first time-window (240– 265 ms), the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) heading to a negative peak could be interpreted as a late N200 component, despite the fact that the amplitude is positive and that the N200 typically peaks about 50 ms earlier (Schmitt et al, 2000; Folstein and Van Petten, 2007)
Summary
The way we reach the understanding of written words is a crucial issue in explaining how language is processed. A lexical decision refers to the human ability to recognize words, and it can be measured in the Lexical Decision Task (LDT) paradigm (Meyer and Schvaneveldt, 1971). This standard task involves a comparison of lexically meaningful words and formally similar pseudowords. In LDT studies, pseudowords are carefully selected so that they are similar to words in any formal terms, such as length or letter structure. Such stimuli are used in practice to test the level of proficiency in a foreign language (Lemhöfer and Broersma, 2012)
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