Processing gender agreement errors in pleasant and unpleasant words: An ERP study at the sentence level

Isabel Padrón,Isabel Fraga,Carlos Acuña-Fariña

doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2019.134538

Isabel Padrón, Isabel Fraga + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2019.134538

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Journal: Neuroscience Letters	Publication Date: Oct 15, 2019
Citations: 9	License type: cc-by

Affiliation: University of Santiago de Compostela

Abstract

In this study we examine the extent to which aspects such as the emotionality coded in words may interfere with the processing of gender agreement errors in a sentence grammaticality judgement task. We follow the methodological pattern of our previous experiments, using consistently the same kind of structure and task (gender agreement) and only emotional (pleasant vs unpleasant) words, in an attempt to clarify whether neural correlates and performance show similar patterns in positive and negative words. We found an emotional effect in the N400 time window for unpleasant adjectives as well as the classic grammaticality effects in the left anterior negativity (LAN) and the P600 components. Overall, our results confirm those of our previous studies in that the LAN and the P600 grammaticality effects are not influenced by the emotional valence of moderately arousing pleasant and unpleasant words, showing that during sentence reading morphosyntactic error detection seems to be encapsulated.

Highlights

It has been broadly established that emotional words show differences in comparison to neutral words
In the time course registered by event-related potentials (ERPs), early emotional effects are interpreted in terms of attention capture and maintenance, while late effects are associated to strategic higher-level control [5] and evaluative processing [6]
Statistical analyses (a 2 × 2 repeated measures ANOVA) of accuracy data revealed a main grammaticality effect [F(1,25) = 52.76, p < .01, ηp2 = .67], showing that participants were more accurate in the match conditions (97%) than in the mismatch conditions (91%)

Summary

Introduction

It has been broadly established that emotional words show differences in comparison to neutral words. Positive words may be recognized more accurately than negative and neutral ones, and negative words give rise to greater interference in Stroop tasks (see [6] for a review of all these findings). Emotional words have shown effects as rapidly as in the 80–120 ms time range [3,10,24,26], as regards early effects, the most consistent finding points to the 200–300 ms window, the so-called Early Posterior Negativity [5,42]. In the time course registered by event-related potentials (ERPs), early emotional effects are interpreted in terms of attention capture and maintenance, while late effects are associated to strategic higher-level control [5] and evaluative processing [6] (for a recent review on neural correlates of emotional words, see [25])

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