Neural and behavioural correlates of gender agreement processing in emotional words

Abstract

According to the Syntactic Encapsulation Hypothesis, syntactic processing occurs in discrete and encapsulated stages, whereby grammatical information is always analysed before any other linguistic input. Furthermore, this process is posited to be domain-specific, so syntactic and extra-syntactic information are not subject to interaction until later stages of linguistic processing. Following this hypothesis, a syntactic operation such as grammatical gender coindexations in agreement should not be affected by the emotional connotation of words, a lexico-semantic variable. However, the available evidence is contradictory. Some studies have found emotional words to affect agreement processing, while others have consistently found no evidence for such interactive effects.