Abstract
Recent studies demonstrate that syntactic processing can be affected by emotional information and that subliminal emotional information can also affect cognitive processes. In this study, we explore whether unconscious emotional information may also impact syntactic processing. In an Event-Related brain Potential (ERP) study, positive, neutral and negative subliminal adjectives were inserted within neutral sentences, just before the presentation of the supraliminal adjective. They could either be correct (50%) or contain a morphosyntactic violation (number or gender disagreements). Larger error rates were observed for incorrect sentences than for correct ones, in contrast to most studies using supraliminal information. Strikingly, emotional adjectives affected the conscious syntactic processing of sentences containing morphosyntactic anomalies. The neutral condition elicited left anterior negativity (LAN) followed by a P600 component. However, a lack of anterior negativity and an early P600 onset for the negative condition were found, probably as a result of the negative subliminal correct adjective capturing early syntactic resources. Positive masked adjectives in turn prompted an N400 component in response to morphosyntactic violations, probably reflecting the induction of a heuristic processing mode involving access to lexico-semantic information to solve agreement anomalies. Our results add to recent evidence on the impact of emotional information on syntactic processing, while showing that this can occur even when the reader is unaware of the emotional stimuli.
Highlights
IntroductionDetecting and processing emotional information has an enormous adaptive value
We are surrounded by endless emotional stimulation
We analyzed the data for the subjects that detected subliminal adjectives, by means of a one-way ANOVA for Emotion factor
Summary
Detecting and processing emotional information has an enormous adaptive value. This is so to such an extent that, during recent decades, it has been observed that emotions interact with almost all cognitive domains investigated, such as planning, attention, memory, decision making, or language (Ashby et al, 1999; Mitchell and Phillips, 2007; Pessoa, 2008; Vissers et al, 2010; JiménezOrtega et al, 2012; Martín-Loeches et al, 2012). Gibbons (2009), by means of Event-Related brain Potentials (ERP), observed the effects of subliminal emotional words on preference judgments regarding subsequent target stimuli such as paintings and portraits. The impact of subliminal words on cognitive processing appears to be supported
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