The influence of emotional words on predictive processing during sentence comprehension

ABSTRACT

The current study examined the influence of contexts’ emotional arousal on prediction and integration of words during sentence comprehension. In sentence context, we manipulated the emotional arousal of verbs and the predictability of their following neutral nouns. At the anticipatory stage of the upcoming nouns, a larger sustained negativity was elicited in the highly constraining than the weakly constraining sentences for the neutral verbs but not for the emotional verbs. The results reflect reduced processing loads in response to the pre-activation of the highly predictable nouns when the emotional verbs automatically captured sufficient attentional resources. At the integration stage of the nouns, we found reduced N400 and LPC amplitudes for the highly versus weakly predictable nouns in both the emotionally arousing and non-arousing conditions. The findings suggest that the emotional arousal of context interacts with the prediction of upcoming words, but not the integration of the bottom-up inputs.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional words
• prediction
• sentence comprehension
• EEG

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China to Y.Y. [grant number 31070989] and L.W. [grant number 31200849], as well as the Excellent Young Researcher Foundation of Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences to L.W. [grant number Y4CX152008].