Words’ Emotional Valencc Modulates The Time Course Of Semantic Satiation

“Words satiation” refers to a feeling of uncertainty after prolonged gazing at aword or a mass of repetition. Most researchers have studied words satiation by speededcategory matching paradigm, and assumed “Word satiation” is “Semantic satiation”actually, which means a worse performance after a prolonged gazing or amountedrepetition. The semantic satiation effect has been studied for more than a century, butlittle is known about how this effect may vary by type of words. Previous studiesmanifested that the emotional valence is an important factor of word processing.Therefore, the present study inspected the effect of different valence on the semanticsatiation.The present study was consisted of two studies. The first study aimed to investigatewhether the “Words satiation” is a kind of “semantic satiation”, including twoexperiments. A speeded category matching paradigm was used to examine whether thesemantic satiation could be induced for Chinese words in the first experiment. In thepresent study,11one-character category words (e.g.,花(flower)) were chosen for Exp1,and each category contained20two-character sample words(e.g.,玫瑰(Rose)). Theparticipants were asked to make a membership decision in the task. The result showedthat the response time under repeated category condition was longer than that undercontrol condition, which means that the word satiation could be induced in Chinesewords. However, Tian&Huber pointed out that this “word satiation” maynot be a kindof “semantic satiation”, but could be “orthographic satiation” or “associative satiation”that produced in the association between repeated orthographic and its meaningrepresentation. In consideration of this view, a modified speeded category matchingparadigm was used to investigate whether “semantic satiation” could be induced inChinese words. The difference between Exp1and Exp2is that11one-charactercategory words were replaced by11two-character sample words that belonged to thesecategory words (e.g.,花-玫瑰(flower-rose) was replaced by玫瑰-牡丹(rose-Peony)).Participants were required to judge whether a couple of words presented together was belonged to the same category. The modified paradigm of Exp2was able to avoid theoccurrence of both “orthographic satiation” and “associative satiation”. The resultshowed that the response time under repeated category condition was longer than thatunder control condition, which means “words satiation” occurred in the semanticrepresentation.Bytheoriginalandthemodifiedparadigm,Study1showedthat“semanticsatiation”could be induced in Chinese words. In study2, the influence of emotional valence onsemantic satiation was investigated in words with different emotional valence (negative,neutral, positive), and the result showed that the emotional valence would modulate thetime course of semantic satiation. For the neutral words, semantic satiation showedfirstly but disappeared later. Satiation was observed in the positive words too, but itwasn’t observed in negative words. It could be accounted that the processing depth andecological significance was different in different emotional-valence words, that is, thesemantic processing of neutral words is not deep relatively, and the negative wordscontains dangerous information which could play an protective role for individual.In conclusion, the present study demonstrated that Chinese characters could evokesemantic satiation; the emotional valence plays an important role in the semanticsatiation; and that the process of semantic satiation in different emotional-valencewords is different from each other. Further research of semantic satiation shouldconsider the influence of emotional valence, which means the relevant language designconcerning semantic satiation (e.g., warning slogan) should take the factor of emotionalvalence into consideration. In theory, the achievement of the present study promotesthe discovery of modulation mechanism of emotional factor on language, and inspiresthe reflection of interaction of language and emotion. In application, it could provideuseful guide in language leaning course.In general, the present study showed various valence force different effect onsemantic satiation. Therefore, the further study of semantic satiation should take theemotional factor into consider. The current study promoted the research of interactionbetween emotion and language, and provided the new evidence of linguistic emotional regulation. Besides the present study provided guidance of language teachingpractically.