Processing Of Affective Word During Sentence Reading: An ERP Study

The present study used event-related potentials(ERP) and the sentence meaning decision task to investigate the processing differences between positive and the negative words in three positions of the predicate,the attribute and object during sentence comprehension.Fifteen young college students and postgraduate students(8 males,7 females) participated in the study.In the experiment,the sentence was presented word by word in the rapid serial visual presentation(RSVP).Subjects were asked to finish the meaning decision task(decision whether the sentence can express certain meaning) after reading the sentence.EEG was recording when subjects were reading sentences.The results showed that(1) there was an early affective effect in the predicate position, namely,in 220-270ms time window,negative words elicited more positive amplitudes compared to positive word in frontal,central and central-parietal electrodes.(2) In the attribute position, affective effect appeared in 310-450ms time window,mainly distributes in the left frontal,central and central-parietal electrodes.The negative words induced attenuated amplitudes compared to positive words.(3) In the object position,affective effect appeared in 300-410ms time window, mainly distributes in frontal,central and central-parietal electrodes.The negative words induced an attenuated negativity compared to positive words.In the object position,in contrast to attribute position,the positive words induced attenuated negativity compared to negative words without the left hemisphere superiority.These results confirmed that there are different ERP differences between positive and negative words in the three positions of sentence.Furthermore,EPN effect and LPP effect were discovered in none of the three positions in sentences.The results provide evidence for this view that it is different between affective word processing in the sentence and single affective word processing.