Broadly: how does the processing of emotional inputs impact our behavior? Specifically:
- In what ways does lexical valence (including known effects in semantic integration and priming) impact overall performance when reading a text aloud?
- How does valence interact with word frequency and discourse context to influence oral reading behavior?
Robust effects of word frequency in lexical processing have been found at the level of the individual word. Effects of lexical valence on visual word processing have been more conflicted, with all emotional words (positive and negative) favored in some studies while only positive stimuli receiving a processing boost in others. Importantly, however, word frequency and lexical valence are known to interact: both with one another and with the ongoing accrual of discourse context that modulates word-level predictability. This study seeks to expand the current knowledge of word frequency and lexical valence effects, along with their interactions, to the oral reading of multi-sentence stimuli in a naturalistic context.
Texts are designed to be heavy on emotional words, allowing performance to be analyzed according to elements of the stimuli themselves (passage valence and direction of the emotional switch). Future work may also explore individual differences (mood state, emotion regulation abilities, and measures of anxiety).
Poster entitled "Effects of Lexical Valence and Emotional (In)Congruency in Naturalistic Reading Aloud" presented at the Society for the Neurobiology of Language in Philadelphia, PA (USA).
Preprint available on PsyArXiv.
Article, including supplementary materials, published in the APA journal 'Emotion': http://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001298
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Jessica M. Alexander | conceptualization, investigation, formal analysis, visualization, project administration |
| Dr. George A. Buzzell | methodology, resources, supervision |
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