| We conducted four lexical decision experiments involving unimodal visual stimuli, cross-modal auditory stimuli at normal utterance speed,and cross-modal auditory stimuli at a slow speed,and using sentences with emotion-arousing material.The material was the same in the four experiments.Both visual and auditory experiments involved the presentation of emotion-inducing sentences and the brief presentation of a probe word.The task was to understand the meaning of the sentence and to indicate whether the probe word as an actual word or not.The first experiment involved a unimodal visual presentation of sentences,with the probe word immediately following the finite verb.Results indicate that visual unimodal presentation exhibit an emotion consistency effect.That is,a finite verb and a probe word sharing similar emotional values yielded faster reaction times when compared to contradictory ones.The second experiment was different from the first experiment in that the presentation of the probe word did not immediately follow the finite verb.Additionally,the sentence contained three emotionally neutral words,after which the probe word was presented.This experiment yielded similar results with respect to the emotion consistency effect.The third experiment(normal speed of utterance) and the fourth experiment (slow speed) both involved an auditory presentation of the sentence and a visual presentation of the probe word immediately after the finite verb was presented.The presentation of the probe word did not interfere with the presentation of the sentence.Results show that cross-modal stimulus presentation yields an emotion consistency effect,whether the sentence is presented at normal speed or at a slow speed.Taken together,the results from the four experiments suggest that sentences with emotional content have a both immediate and continuous influence that is independent from the sentence's presentation style(visual or auditory) and presentation speed (normal or slow). |
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