| The acquisition and mastery of vocabulary play a very important role in our life and learning.Therefore,the processing mechanism of vocabulary has been one of the hot topics in the field of linguistics.At the same time,our daily life is full of various emotional experiences,such as: happy,sad and other emotions.Emotions play an important role in expressing our feelings about things and our perception of life.With the continuous development of cognitive linguistics,psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience,more and more scholars have begun to pay attention to the relationship between vocabulary and emotion,and have carried out in-depth exploration and research.There are three main theories in the academic field about the vocabulary’s concreteness effect.Pavio proposes the theory of dual coding.He believes that we simultaneously activate the semantic system on the left side of the brain and the imagery system on the right side of the brain in the processing of vocabulary when we process concrete words.Schwanenflugel proposes the context availability model.He believes that the differences between our processing of concrete words and abstract words are mainly the different processing of vocabulary in the same speech system.The processing of vocabulary does not activate the representation system.Holcomb proposes the extended dual coding theory.He believes that the interpretation of concreteness effects cannot be limited to the dual coding theory or the context availability model.Two theories should be combined to explain the corresponding research.In addition,the participants mostly used native speakers of English or Indo-European languages in many studies of vocabulary processing.What’s more,many experiments have found that participants’ response results have significant individual differences for processing vocabulary.Therefore,this experiment attempts to discuss the following research questions.Firstly,do Chinese English learners produce concreteness effect in the emotional processing of nouns? Do Chinese English learners response faster to concrete emotional words than abstract emotional words? Are the accuracy for concrete emotional words higher than abstract emotional words? Secondly,do Chinese Englishlearners’ emotional processing of nouns depend on lexical concreteness? Will it produce the same ERP components as native speakers? Thirdly,do Chinese English learners have significant interactions on processing for emotionality and concreteness of nouns?The paper explores the neural mechanism of English emotion vocabulary processing in Chinese English learners by using English emotion nouns such as “dancer” as experimental data and adopts event-related potentials technique.Chinese English learners are selected as participants and are divided into two groups which are English major(20)and non-English major(20).The experiment adopts lexical judgement task and stimuli materials appear randomly.Participants are asked to understand a string of English characters on the computer screen and press the keys to determine whether the characters are real or false.The study adopts E-Prime 2.0 and SPSS 21.0 to record and analyze behavioral data and EEG data.The experiment uses a 2 × 3 × 2 three-factor mixed design and repeated measurement ANOVA to analyze behavioral data and EEG data.The main results are as follows:Firstly,analysis of behavioral data of two groups of participants finds that the level of English level affects the processing of emotional vocabulary.The reaction time and accuracy rate of the participants from English major to emotional vocabulary processing are significantly higher than those from non-English major.Secondly,analysis of behavioral data and EEG data under different concrete and emotional conditions finds that the reaction time and accuracy rate of concrete words are significantly higher than those of abstract words.The reaction time and accuracy rate of positive words are significantly higher than those of neutral words and negative words.In addition,both groups of participants produce significant N400 and late positive potential in the experiment.Thirdly,the experimental results show that Chinese English learners also have concreteness effect in the emotional processing of nouns.The reaction time of concrete emotional words is significantly faster than that of abstract emotional words,and the accuracy rate of concrete emotional words is significantly higher than that of abstractemotional words.Fourthly,the experimental results show that Chinese English learners will also produce the same EEG components as N400 and LPC components in processing emotional nouns.The concreteness effect of N400 amplitude is significant,and concrete emotion words induce enhanced N400(non-English major)than abstract emotion words.Abstract emotion words induce enhanced N400(English major)than concrete emotion words.This result partially supports the problem of this study,and emotional processing of nouns depends partially on the concreteness of vocabulary.And experiments show that more effort is needed to process neutral words for relatively low-level participants.The main effect of LPC is significant.Positive words induce larger LPC than negative words.Positive words and neutral words,neutral words and negative words are not significantly different.Finally,there is a significant interaction under abstract words for Chinese English learners in processing emotionality and concreteness of nouns.Neutral abstract words induce enhanced N400 than positive abstract words.The difference in N400 amplitude of positive abstract words and negative abstract words is not significant.Compared with neutral words,positive words and negative words are not significantly different in the semantic processing stage which indicates that the emotional information of the vocabulary provides sufficient context and experience information for the participants,thereby reducing the difference between positive and negative words.This research has certain theoretical and practical significance.Firstly,from the perspective of linguistics,clarifying brain neural processing mechanisms within the concreteness and emotionality of vocabulary can verify the relevant linguistic theoretical hypotheses and help to resolve controversial issues.Secondly,from the perspective of cognitive science,figuring out brain neural processing mechanisms can reveal neural network in the brain area when the brain processes vocabulary which includes emotionality and concreteness.Above all,it can enrich the interaction theory of emotion and cognition.Finally,from the perspective of practical value,the reading ability of the language can beimproved by adjusting the emotional background of the context. |
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