Abstract
The goal of the present study was to investigate whether 6–9-year old children and adults show similar neural responses to affective words. An event-related neuroimaging paradigm was used in which both age cohorts performed the same auditory lexical decision task (LDT). The results show similarities in (auditory) lexico-semantic network activation as well as in areas associated with affective information. In both age cohorts’ activations were stronger for positive than for negative words, thus exhibiting a positivity superiority effect. Children showed less activation in areas associated with affective information in response to all three valence categories than adults. Our results are discussed in the light of computational models of word recognition, and previous findings of affective contributions to LDT in adults.
Highlights
The goal of the present study was to investigate whether 6–9-year old children and adults show similar neural responses to affective words
Briesemeister et al.[16] described an emotion network activated during an lexical decision task (LDT) involving the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)[19,20], posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), insula, hippocampus, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)[21] indicating an important contribution of affect in lexical decisions
The present study investigated the question whether children to adults coactivate regions associated with affective semantic processing while performing a standard auditory LDT without any explicit focus on emotion-relevant processing[16,18]
Summary
The goal of the present study was to investigate whether 6–9-year old children and adults show similar neural responses to affective words. In the last decades the modular perspective was replaced by a distributed interactive one[3,4,5], resulting in numerous studies interested in both language and emotion It is still an open question how these systems interact, and how linguistic and affective information is connected in performing higher-level cognitive tasks, such as word recognition or lexical decision. Weiss-Croft and Baldeweg[33] related this age effect to an ongoing growth of the mental lexicon with exposure to language and richer semantic representations with increasing competition between them They identified increasing activity in IFG and supramarginal gyrus, associated with semantic and phonological decision making. Despite functional fine-tuning during development, children’s language system shows
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
