Center for Human Evolution and Behavior, UCM-ISCIII, Monforte de Lemos 5, Pabellón 14, 28029 Madrid, Spain.
Neuropsychologia. 2012 Dec;50(14):3262-72. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.09.010. Epub 2012 Sep 13.
Whereas most previous studies on emotion in language have focussed on single words, we investigated the influence of the emotional valence of a word on the syntactic and semantic processes unfolding during sentence comprehension, by means of event-related brain potentials (ERP). Experiment 1 assessed how positive, negative, and neutral adjectives that could be either syntactically correct or incorrect (violation of number agreement) modulate syntax-sensitive ERP components. The amplitude of the left anterior negativity (LAN) to morphosyntactic violations increased in negative and decreased in positive words in comparison to neutral words. In Experiment 2, the same sentences were presented but positive, negative, and neutral adjectives could be either semantically correct or anomalous given the sentence context. The N400 to semantic anomalies was not significantly affected by the valence of the violating word. However, positive words in a sentence seemed to influence semantic correctness decisions, also triggering an apparent N400 reduction irrespective of the correctness value of the word. Later linguistic processes, as reflected in the P600 component, were unaffected in either experiment. Overall, our results indicate that emotional valence in a word impacts the syntactic and semantic processing of sentences, with differential effects as a function of valence and domain.
虽然之前大多数关于语言情感的研究都集中在单个单词上，但我们通过事件相关脑电位 (ERP) 研究了单词的情感效价对句子理解过程中句法和语义加工的影响。实验 1 评估了积极、消极和中性形容词对句法敏感的 ERP 成分的影响，这些形容词既可以是句法正确的，也可以是不正确的（违反数一致）。与中性词相比，负形容词和正形容词对形态句法错误的左前负 (LAN) 振幅增加。在实验 2 中，呈现了相同的句子，但考虑到句子语境，积极、消极和中性形容词可以是语义正确的或异常的。违反词的效价对语义异常的 N400 没有显著影响。然而，句子中的积极词似乎会影响语义正确性判断，也会引发明显的 N400 减少，而不管词的正确性值如何。在这两个实验中，后期语言过程，如 P600 成分，不受影响。总的来说，我们的结果表明，单词的情感效价会影响句子的句法和语义加工，并且效价和域的不同会产生不同的影响。
