Erp Study Of Emotional Words In The Sentence Processing In The Emotional Context Conditions

The context is one of the most important factors of language process.It involves linguistic context and nonlinguistic context.Psycholinguistics have investigated more about the function of linguistic context in language process.However,fewer studies have been done about nonlinguistic context,especially in affective context.This study will explore how affective context impacts on affective words in sentences.Used affective priming paradigm,positive,negative or neutral pictures which utilized affective context as primes and affective words which utilized positive or negative words in different position as targets to investigate how affective context impacts on affective words in different position in a sentence.16 students participated in the current experiment and asked to judge whether the sentences presented to them are normal or abnormal.During read these materials,recorded ERPs.We recorded that affective priming effect happened different position,which means the consistency of priming picture and the affect of target words is significant influence target words. But there are difference ERPs in different position:(1) In the beginning of the sentence,affective context elicited a larger N400 than neutral.N400 appeared during 320～420ms time window.(2) In the middle of the sentence,incongruent context elicited a larger N400 than congruent context. N400 distributed in frontal and central during 350～450ms.(3) In the last of the sentence,there is a significant difference between incongruent and congruent context during 290～340ms and 400～700ms.Above all,affective context can impact on words wherever it exists.And affective priming effect to the emotional words in the sentence which is different from the reserch in the past. Affective priming effect at that time occurs in the single word.Maybe there is due to the independent mechanisms during the word processing in the sentence.