How the brain processes emotional meaning of indirect reply: evidence from EEG

ABSTRACT

People often express their message and emotions through indirect utterances. How the intended meaning of indirect utterances is comprehended remains not completely clear. We investigated how the emotional meaning of indirect replies is processed in the brain. Participants were required to comprehend dialogues. Three types of replies were constructed: direct reply, informative indirect reply and negative indirect reply. Our results showed that both informative and negative indirect replies were understood with lower accuracy and longer behavioural reaction times than direct replies. Moreover, informative indirect replies elicited a larger N400 than direct replies, whereas negative indirect replies (compared to informative indirect replies as well as direct replies) elicited enhanced ERP responses only over the late P600 component. These findings suggest that the cognitive processes involved in and the time course of the comprehension of indirect replies change dynamically as a function of the emotional aspects of the intended meaning.

KEYWORDS:

• Indirect reply
• pragmatic inference
• speakers’ intention
• language understanding
• EEG (Electroencephalogram)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Credit authorship contribution statement

Xinyu Guo: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Visualisation, Writing – original draft. Xiaoqing Li: Conceptualisation, Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition. Yufang Yang: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing, Resources, Funding acquisition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 32171057].