On the limits of affective neurolinguistics: a “universe” that quickly expands

ABSTRACT

In our target article (Hinojosa et al., 2019. Affective neurolinguistics: Towards a framework for reconciling language and emotion. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1620957), we reviewed neuroimaging studies that examined the effects of emotional content on several language-related processes and provided a framework that aimed to account for the representation of emotional lexical features in the brain. The commentaries to our article call the attention on several challenges that investigations concerned with the neurobiological bases of the interplay between emotion and language processing will have to face in the future. Crucially, they also highlight the need of expanding the theoretical and research limits of affective neurolinguistics to incorporate issues such as the communicative functions of affective language or the linguistic and people’s contextual factors involved in the production and comprehension of emotional language. In our response to the commentaries, we have summarised evidence that supports these claims and provide insights on the direction that affective neurolinguistics might follow during its expansion.

KEYWORDS:

• Language
• emotion
• communicative
• context
• neurolinguistics‌

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades of Spain (PGC2018-098558-B-I00, PGC2018-098876-B-100 and RED2018-102615-T), by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO/FEDER, PSI2015-63525-P), and by the Comunidad de Madrid (H2019/HUM-5705).