RT Journal Article
T1 Unpleasant words can affect the detection of morphosyntactic errors: An ERP study on individual differences
A1 Vieitez Portas, Lucía
A1 Padrón Rodríguez, Isabel
A1 Díaz Lago, Marcos
A1 Dios Flores, Iria de
A1 Fraga Carou, Isabel
K1 Gender agreement
K1 Individual ifferences
K1 LAN/N400
K1 P600
K1 Unpleasant words
AB In recent years, several ERP studies have investigated whether the early computation of agreement is permeable to the emotional content of words. Some studies have reported interactive effects of grammaticality and emotionality in the left anterior negativity (LAN) component, while others have failed to replicate these results. Furthermore, novel findings suggest that grammatical processing can elicit different neural patterns across individuals. In this study, we aim to investigate whether the interaction between grammaticality and emotionality is restricted to participants with a specific neural profile. Sixty-one female native speakers of Spanish performed an agreement judgment task in noun phrases composed of a determiner, a noun, and an unpleasant or neutral adjective that could agree or disagree in gender with the preceding noun. Our results support the existence of two different brain profiles: negative and positive dominance (individuals showing either larger LAN or larger P600 amplitudes in ungrammatical stimuli than in grammatical ones, respectively). Interestingly, the neural pattern of these two groups diverged at different points along the time course. Thus, the negative dominance group showed grammaticality effects as early as 200 ms, along with parallel and autonomous processing of grammaticality and emotionality at the LAN/N400 time window. Instead, for the positive dominance group an early interaction was found at around 200 ms, evidencing a grammaticality effect that emerged only for unpleasant words. Our findings confirm the role of individual differences in the interplay between grammar and emotion at the neural level and call for the inclusion of this perspective in studies on syntactic processing.
PB Wiley
SN 0048-5772
YR 2024
FD 2024-07-31
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10347/39743
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10347/39743
LA eng
NO Vieitez, L., Padrón, I., Díaz-Lago, M., de Dios-Flores, I., & Fraga, I. (2024). Unpleasant words can affect the detection of morphosyntactic errors: An ERP study on individual differences. Psychophysiology, 61, e14663
NO This study was supported by grant PID2019-110583GB-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and grant ED431B 2022/19 funded by the Autonomous Government of Galicia (Xunta de Galicia). The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article.
DS Minerva
RD 22 abr 2026