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Affect-Language Interface: A Reductionist Approach

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Affect-Language Interactions in Native and Non-Native English Speakers

Part of the book series: The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series ((BMBBS))

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Abstract

In communication, people express affect nonverbally, e.g. by means of body postures or facial expressions, and verbally, i.e. through the use of language. This chapter looks at how people process affective meaning in the domain of single words, such as love or hate. A comprehensive review is presented of the cognitive and neurocognitive correlates of affective word processing. The reviewed cognitive evidence focuses on the impact of affective valence on participants’ behavioural performance in visual word recognition (lexical decision task) and word naming (emotional Stroop task). In general, these studies reveal a processing facilitation for affective words, with some studies reporting valence-specific effects. The reviewed neurocognitive evidence reports neurophysiological responses to affective words in a variety of tasks (e.g. lexical decision task, semantic decision task, silent reading task), with a particular emphasis on event-related potential (ERPs) studies. Here, a robust impact of affective valence on word comprehension is found at the pre-lexical (e.g. P1, N1), lexico-semantic (EPN, N400), and post-lexico-semantic (LPC) processing stages. The cognitive and neurocognitive findings are discussed in light of the proposed theories of affective word recognition, i.e. the motivated attention, attentional vigilance, and negativity-bias hypotheses. The chapter ends with a discussion of potential concerns about the reliability of a reductionist approach to affective language investigation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Here, I mainly refer to structural and generativist approaches to linguistics. Some functionalist approaches to linguistics, by contrast, have made attempts to include the emotive or expressive function of language in their analyses (e.g. Bühler, 1934; Jakobson, 1960; Sapir, 1927).

  2. 2.

    Larsen et al. (2006) conducted their analysis on 1033 words whose valence ratings were adopted from the original 32 emotional Stroop studies. Because the procedure for obtaining valence ratings was not standardised across the studies, with the valence norms being obtained from both healthy and clinical population, Estes and Adelman (2008a) argued that this could impact the reliability of the results reported by Larsen et al. (2006).

  3. 3.

    The stimuli are English translations of the originally used Hebrew words.

  4. 4.

    However, the effect obtained in a single- and mixed-block presentation did not differ significantly in patient populations.

  5. 5.

    The Stroop effect for colour words, however, was larger than for colour-related affective words.

  6. 6.

    Note that the latency and topography of the N1 may change as this component has been shown to be sensitive to perceptual features of the stimuli as well as task demands. For example, the affective modulation of N1 in single words has been observed in the time window of 135–180 ms (Scott et al., 2009), 110–140 ms (Kissler & Herbert, 2013), or 150–190 ms (Kuchinke et al., 2015) and has been observed at both anterior (i.e. anterior N1; Hinojosa et al., 2015) and posterior (i.e. posterior N1; Kuchinke et al., 2015) electrode sites.

  7. 7.

    Sometimes referred to as late positivity potential (LPP).

  8. 8.

    These variables included concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, familiarity, word frequency, orthographic neighbourhood density, word length, syllable length, morpheme length, and mean position bigram frequency (Yap & Seow, 2014, p. 528).

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  1. Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

    Rafał Jończyk

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Jończyk, R. (2016). Affect-Language Interface: A Reductionist Approach. In: Affect-Language Interactions in Native and Non-Native English Speakers. The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47635-3_2

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