Jiménez-Ortega Laura, Espuny Javier, de Tejada Pilar Herreros, Vargas-Rivero Carolina, Martín-Loeches Manuel
Centre for Human Evolution and Behaviour, Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM-ISCIII)Madrid, Spain.
Psychobiology Department, Complutense University of MadridMadrid, Spain.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2017 Apr 25;11:192. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00192. eCollection 2017.
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.
近期研究表明，句法处理会受到情绪信息的影响，并且阈下情绪信息也会影响认知过程。在本研究中，我们探究无意识情绪信息是否也会影响句法处理。在一项事件相关电位（ERP）研究中，在阈上形容词呈现之前，将积极、中性和消极的阈下形容词插入中性句子中。这些句子可能是正确的（50%），也可能包含形态句法违反（数或性不一致）。与大多数使用阈上信息的研究相反，观察到不正确句子的错误率高于正确句子。令人惊讶的是，情绪形容词影响了包含形态句法异常的句子的有意识句法处理。中性条件引发了左前负波（LAN），随后是P600成分。然而，在消极条件下发现缺乏前负波且P600起始较早，这可能是由于消极阈下正确形容词捕获了早期句法资源所致。相反，积极掩蔽形容词在出现形态句法违反时会引发N400成分，这可能反映了一种启发式处理模式的诱导，该模式涉及获取词汇语义信息以解决一致性异常。我们的研究结果为情绪信息对句法处理的影响增添了新的证据，同时表明即使读者未意识到情绪刺激，这种影响也可能发生。
