Dwivedi Veena D, Selvanayagam Janahan
Department of Psychology and Centre for Neuroscience, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada.
Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2021 Mar 31;12:566894. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.566894. eCollection 2021.
We examined whether the N400 Event-Related Potential (ERP) component would be modulated by dispositional affect during sentence processing. In this study, 33 participants read sentences manipulated by direct object type (congruent vs. incongruent) and object determiner type (definite vs. demonstrative). We were particularly interested in sentences of the form: (i) vs. (ii) We expected that processing incongruent direct objects (#) vs. congruent objects () would elicit N400 effects. Previous ERP language experiments have shown that participants in (induced) positive and negative moods were differentially sensitive to semantic anomaly, resulting in different N400 effects. Presently, we ask whether individual dispositional affect scores (as measured by the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule; PANAS) would modulate N400 effects as shown previously. Namely, previous results showed larger N400 effects associated with happy moods and attenuated amplitudes associated with sad moods. Results revealed significant N400 effects, driven by vs. , where larger amplitude differences were found for individuals showing smaller negative affect (NA) scores, thus partially replicating previous findings. We discuss our results in terms of theories of local (lexical) inhibition, such that low NA promotes stronger lexico-semantic links in sentences. Finally, our results support accounts of language processing that include social and biological characteristics of individuals during real-time sentence comprehension.
我们研究了在句子处理过程中，N400事件相关电位（ERP）成分是否会受到特质性情感的调节。在本研究中，33名参与者阅读了由直接宾语类型（一致与不一致）和宾语限定词类型（定冠词与指示代词）操控的句子。我们特别关注以下形式的句子：（i） 与（ii） 。我们预期，处理不一致的直接宾语（#）与一致的宾语（ ）会引发N400效应。先前的ERP语言实验表明，处于（诱发的）积极和消极情绪中的参与者对语义异常的敏感度不同，从而导致不同的N400效应。目前，我们探究个体特质性情感得分（通过积极和消极情感量表；PANAS测量）是否会如先前所示调节N400效应。也就是说，先前的结果显示，与快乐情绪相关的N400效应更大，而与悲伤情绪相关的波幅减弱。结果显示，由 与 驱动产生了显著的N400效应，其中，消极情感（NA）得分较低的个体的波幅差异更大，从而部分重复了先前的研究结果。我们根据局部（词汇）抑制理论来讨论我们的结果，即低NA促进句子中更强的词汇-语义联系。最后，我们的结果支持了在实时句子理解过程中纳入个体社会和生物学特征的语言处理观点。
