The Age Difference Of Processing Emotional Verbs In Sentence Reading

At present,the trend of aging in China is increasingly intensified,and the abilities of the elderly in various aspects are increasingly degraded with the increase of age,some research has pointed out that the semantic processing of old people are more dependent on context information.As a kind of special vocabulary,emotional words not only express the emotional meaning,but also possess the common linguistic information as general vocabulary,therefore,emotional words have been a research focus of psychological linguistics.As for the age differences in emotional word processing,most studies have shown that older people have positive preferences,that is,they allocate more attentional resources to words with positive information,while younger people have negative preferences.However,the current researches are mostly about the independent presentation of emotional words and the objects are mostly young people,but few studies combine the old people and the sentence context.Therefore,this thesis intends to study whether the processing of emotional words can be divided into three stages in the sentence and whether there is an age effect when the elderly and young people process semantically violated emotional words in the sentence context.The subjects were 20 young people and 21 old people.The experimental stimulus were80 sentences containing positive words and 80 sentences containing negative words.Among them,half of the sentences were semantically congruent and half were semantically incongruent.The experimental task is to ask the subjects to judge whether the sentence is reasonable or not.The study found that for behavioral data,for sentences containing positive words,people performed better than sentences containing negative words,regardless of age.There were also significant differences between the elderly and the young,especially in sentences containing negative words,which showed that the elderly had lower accuracy and longer response time.No N400 effect reflecting semantic violation was found through grand average analysis of electrophysiological results,but both groups had significant LPC effects when processing sentences containing positive words,when participants processed sentences containing negative words,P200 effect was found in young people,but not in old people.Therefore,by referring to the method of Tanner(2014),individual difference analysis was carried out on the experimental data,and it was found that the subjects dominated bynegativity had obvious N400 effect,while the subjects dominated by positivity had positive waves lasting for hundreds of milliseconds,but no significant between-group difference was found.These results indicate that in this experiment,different from emotional words presented separately,the emotional words in sentences is not processed in three stages.In addition,on-line semantic processing of the elderly did not show obvious degradation,but off-line semantic processing showed obvious decline due to the influence of various aspects.As for the processing of positive words and negative words in context,the results show that the behavioral data of the subjects' processing of positive words are generally better,which may reflect the healthy subjects' bias towards positive information.