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Emotional content and bilateral redundancy independently facilitate word processing
Poster Session C, Saturday, September 13, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Johanna Kissler1,2, Emily Panek1; 1Bielefeld University, Department of Psychology, 2Bielefeld University, CRC Linguistic Creativity
Introduction Emotion-laden words usually elicit faster and more correct responses as well as stronger cortical activity than neutral words. Some studies also suggest more bilateral representation of emotion-laden than of neutral words. The bilateral redundancy paradigm allows for inferences about mechanisms of cross-hemispheric integration by comparing lexical decision performance after unilateral and bilateral presentation of visual stimuli. A bilateral advantage, the socalled bilateral redundancy gain, which is reflected in faster responses and higher accuracy, has been previously found for meaningful words, whereas it was absent for meaningless pseudowords. On the electrophysiological level, the word-specific bilateral gain has been reported to be reflected in a significantly stronger N1 after bilateral than unilateral presentation for words only. A possible explanation for the word-specific bilateral redundancy gain is that real words, but not pseudowords, are represented in bilaterally distributed memory circuits, which are activated more efficiently if both hemispheres receive the same input. If emotion-laden words draw even more on bilateral representations than neutral words do, coactivation of both hemispheres should lead to a stronger behavioural and neural bilateral redundancy gain for emotion-laden than for neutral words. Methods Performance, reaction times, and brain event-related potentials were measured from 27 student participants (10 male and 17 female, aged 20 to 35 years) while they performed a lexical decision task on 55 positive, 55 negative and 55 neutral German nouns and 165 pseudowords. Stimuli were presented for 200 ms each either to the left or right visual field or bilaterally in both visual fields with an innermost edge eccentricity of 1.56 degrees of visual angle. Words were matched across categories for arousal, imageability, concreteness, word frequency and word length. Results The results confirm previous behavioural findings regarding the word-specific redundancy gain, with faster responses and higher accuracy after bilateral presentation for words, but not for pseudowords. Emotional words showed a general processing advantage with faster reaction times and higher accuracy in all presentation modes. Both positive and negative words also elicited a stronger N1 ERP potential than neutral words. However, there was no evidence for a stronger bilateral gain, i.e. emotional content and presentation mode did not interact. In the EEG, no specific N1 effect was observed for words following bilateral presentation. Conclusion: Data demonstrate that both bilateral presentation and emotional content facilitate word processing. Bilateral presentation specifically benefits real words but not pseudowords, supporting the view that real words are represented in bilateral neural networks. While emotion-laden words are accessed faster than neutral words and processed more efficiently on a neural level, this advantage occurs for all presentation conditions, arguing against a generally more bi-hemispheric representation of these words. The results constrain theories about the neural representation of emotion-laden words in the brain.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics,