Writing stands as one of humanity’s most profound inventions, facilitating the efficient sharing and transmission of vast amounts of information. Similar to images and facial expressions, visual (written) words possess the ability to evoke emotional connotations. Understanding how the brain perceives these emotional nuances encoded in highly symbolic visual words is a key focus of the emerging field of “affective neurolinguistics.” At the core of this inquiry lies the examination of the early posterior negativity (EPN), an event-related potentials (ERPs) component peaking around 300 ms after stimulus onset in the occipitotemporal scalp region. EPN has consistently emerged in response to emotional stimuli, encompassing pictures, faces, and visual words. However, prior research has notably lacked observation of EPN in response to Chinese emotional words, raising questions about potential differences in emotional processing between Chinese and other languages. Given the logographic nature of the Chinese writing system and the prevalence of compound words in the Chinese lexicon, this study aims to explore whether the emotional processing of Chinese monomorphic and compound words elicits an EPN response. Two experiments were conducted: Experiment 1 utilized one-character words (monomorphic words), while Experiment 2 employed two-character words (compound words). Participants were assigned a go/no-go task, instructed to respond to unknown words (word recognition task) or blue stimuli (color decision task). Data analysis using a data-driven mass univariate approach revealed significant ERP differences between emotional and neutral words. Notably, the time course, scalp topography, and cortical generators of the difference ERP presented a characteristic EPN response in both experiments. These findings strongly support the notion that the processing of emotional connotations in both Chinese monomorphic and compound words is reflected by the EPN, paving the way for future research using EPN as an emotion-related ERP component for investigating emotional processing of Chinese words.

中文翻译：

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早期后否定性所反映的汉语单合词情感内涵的加工


书写是人类最深刻的发明之一，促进了大量信息的有效共享和传输。与图像和面部表情类似，视觉（书面）文字具有唤起情感内涵的能力。了解大脑如何感知这些高度象征性的视觉单词中编码的情感细微差别是“情感神经语言学”新兴领域的一个关键焦点。本次调查的核心是对早期后负性 (EPN) 的检查，这是一种事件相关电位 (ERP) 成分，在枕颞头皮区域刺激开始后 300 毫秒左右达到峰值。 EPN 一直是针对情感刺激而出现的，包括图片、面孔和视觉文字。然而，先前的研究明显缺乏对 EPN 对中文情感词的反应的观察，这引发了关于中文和其他语言之间情感处理的潜在差异的问题。鉴于中文书写系统的语标性质以及中文词典中复合词的普遍性，本研究旨在探讨中文单形词和复合词的情感处理是否会引起 EPN 反应。进行了两个实验：实验一使用单字词（单形词），实验二使用二字词（复合词）。参与者被分配了一项进行/不进行的任务，指示对未知单词（单词识别任务）或蓝色刺激（颜色决策任务）做出反应。使用数据驱动的大量单变量方法进行的数据分析揭示了情感词和中性词之间的显着 ERP 差异。 值得注意的是，差异 ERP 的时间进程、头皮地形和皮层发生器在两个实验中都呈现出特征性的 EPN 反应。这些发现有力地支持了汉语单词和复合词中情感内涵的处理都是由 EPN 反映的观点，为未来使用 EPN 作为情感相关的 ERP 组件来研究汉语词语的情感处理铺平了道路。