Although the modulation of language processing by emotions has often been investigated by using isolated words as targets, or focusing on semantic sentence processing ( Kiefer et al., 2007), recent studies have also explored emotional effects on the syntactic processing of a sentence ( Vissers et al., 2010 Jiménez-Ortega et al., 2012 Martín-Loeches et al., 2012 Hinojosa et al., 2014 Verhees et al., 2015). Overall, the impact of subliminal words on cognitive processing appears to be supported.Īnother relevant area of interest is how emotions affect language comprehension. Targets preceded by positive arousing primes were preferred to targets preceded by negative and non-arousing positive primes. More recently, Gibbons (2009), by means of Event-Related brain Potentials (ERP), observed the effects of subliminal emotional words on preference judgments regarding subsequent target stimuli such as paintings and portraits. (2005) found by means of intracranial recordings that threatening subliminal words modulate the activity of the amygdala at long latencies. Remarkably, even subliminal emotional words can trigger long-lasting cerebral processes. A growing number of experiments demonstrate that unconscious stimuli impact cognitive processes at several levels (for reviews see Dehaene et al., 2006 Van den Bussche et al., 2009 Kiefer et al., 2011). Overall, recent views on brain function and anatomy pose the foundations of rich, extensive interweaving between emotion and cognition, which exhibit highly overlapping networks ( Pessoa, 2008, 2012, 2015b, 2016).Ī large amount of emotional information is often unconsciously processed. This is so to such an extent that, during recent decades, it has been observed that emotions interact with almost all cognitive domains investigated, such as planning, attention, memory, decision making, or language ( Ashby et al., 1999 Mitchell and Phillips, 2007 Pessoa, 2008 Vissers et al., 2010 Jiménez-Ortega et al., 2012 Martín-Loeches et al., 2012). Indeed, detecting and processing emotional information has an enormous adaptive value. We are surrounded by endless emotional stimulation. Our results add to recent evidence on the impact of emotional information on syntactic processing, while showing that this can occur even when the reader is unaware of the emotional stimuli. Positive masked adjectives in turn prompted an N400 component in response to morphosyntactic violations, probably reflecting the induction of a heuristic processing mode involving access to lexico-semantic information to solve agreement anomalies. However, a lack of anterior negativity and an early P600 onset for the negative condition were found, probably as a result of the negative subliminal correct adjective capturing early syntactic resources. The neutral condition elicited left anterior negativity (LAN) followed by a P600 component. Strikingly, emotional adjectives affected the conscious syntactic processing of sentences containing morphosyntactic anomalies. Larger error rates were observed for incorrect sentences than for correct ones, in contrast to most studies using supraliminal information. They could either be correct (50%) or contain a morphosyntactic violation (number or gender disagreements). In an Event-Related brain Potential (ERP) study, positive, neutral and negative subliminal adjectives were inserted within neutral sentences, just before the presentation of the supraliminal adjective. In this study, we explore whether unconscious emotional information may also impact syntactic processing. Recent studies demonstrate that syntactic processing can be affected by emotional information and that subliminal emotional information can also affect cognitive processes.
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