词汇的具体性和情绪性是影响词汇加工的不同因素,高具体性和情绪性都能够促进词汇的加工。本研究同时操纵词汇的具体性和情绪性,使用词汇判定任务和愉悦度判断任务,探讨了情绪名词的具体性效应及其具体性效应是否受词汇情绪信息的影响。结果发现:情绪名词的具体性效应受内隐或外显情绪条件的影响,具体的情绪词比抽象的情绪词反应时间更短、正确率更高,诱发了更大的N400和减小的LPC,但LPC的具体性效应只表现在内隐情绪任务中。词汇的具体性和情绪性的相互影响发生在内隐情绪任务中的语义加工阶段,正性、负性的具体词和抽象词的加工在N400成分上差异不显著,而中性具体词和抽象词在N400成分上差异显著,说明词汇的情绪信息为抽象词的加工提供了充分的语境,因此消除了具体词的加工优势。
In recent years, the relationship between emotion and language has gradually become the focus in language studies. It was reported that concrete words were processed faster and more accurate than abstract words while emotional words possessed similar processing advantage in comparison with neutral words, which termed as concreteness effect and emotion effect, respectively. Moreover, both effects are associated with N400 and LPC: while N400 effect represented semantic activation, LPC might result from mental imagery activation. Despite of the similarity in their effects, emotionality and concreteness of words are still different factors that might affect semantic processing. Therefore, how the two factors influence semantic processing and whether the two factors interacted with each other in word processing remains an open question. To deal with these problems, event-related potentials were recorded in two experiments in which subjects were asked to perform lexical decision task and affective rating task while they were visually presenting concrete and abstract word with neutral, positive and negative emotionality. Results showed that concrete emotional words were processed faster and more accurate than abstract emotional words across emotion type and under both task conditions. Moreover, concrete emotional words elicited an enlarged N400 and decreased LPC than abstract emotional words under both task conditions, although the concreteness effect on LPC reached significant level only under implicit emotional task. In addition, the concreteness effect on N400 under implicit emotional task was modulated by emotionality, as indicated that neutral concrete words elicited enhanced N400 than neutral abstract words, whereas no significant N400 effects were found for either positive or negative words. These results suggested that emotionality and concreteness of words could affect each other in semantic processing stage when the emotionality was implicitly processed, implying that emotionality of words might provide suf