ABSTRACT

Some previous ERP studies on the interaction between emotion and morphosyntactic processing have shown emotional modulations in a left anterior negativity (LAN) indexing the early detection of agreement mismatches, whereas others have failed to report such differences. Here we examined individual differences in the morphosyntactic processing of emotional words, which might account for the divergences found in previous studies. To this aim, neutral and negative adjectives in grammatically correct and incorrect noun phrases (NPs) were presented to 62 participants. The general analyses showed an emotionality effect in the N100 component as well as enhanced LAN and P600 amplitudes in mismatch trials. Further analyses confirmed that most participants showed either LAN (negativity dominance) or P600 (positivity dominance) effects. Importantly, these two groups exhibited different patterns over the time course. Overall, our data suggest that individual differences should be considered when investigating the interplay between emotion and morphosyntactic processing.

摘要

之前关于情绪和形态句法处理之间相互作用的一些 ERP 研究表明，左前负性 (LAN) 中的情绪调制指示了协议不匹配的早期检测，而其他人则未能报告这种差异。在这里，我们检查了情感词的形态句法处理的个体差异，这可能解释了先前研究中发现的差异。为此，向 62 名参与者展示了语法正确和不正确的名词短语 (NP) 中的中性和否定形容词。一般分析显示 N100 组件的情绪效应以及失配试验中增强的 LAN 和 P600 振幅。进一步的分析证实，大多数参与者表现出 LAN（消极优势）或 P600（积极优势）效应。重要的，这两组在时间过程中表现出不同的模式。总的来说，我们的数据表明在调查情绪和形态句法处理之间的相互作用时应该考虑个体差异。