Emotion effects survive non-standard orthographic representations.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistics
• Digital Communication Studies

Background:

• Digital communication fosters non-standard written forms, like Greeklish, diverging from traditional scripts.
• The impact of these orthographic variations on cognitive processes, such as visual word recognition and emotional connotation access, remains under-explored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how different scripts (Greeklish vs. Greek) affect visual word recognition.
• To examine the influence of script type and emotional valence on lexical access speed and affective connotation retrieval.

Main Methods:

• A lexical decision task was administered to 120 native Greek speakers.
• Participants responded to words presented in either Greek or Greeklish script, with varying emotional valence (positive, negative, neutral).
• Stimuli were carefully matched for linguistic properties like frequency, length, and concreteness.

Main Results:

• Words in the standard Greek script were recognized significantly faster than those in Greeklish.
• Response times were negatively correlated with word valence: positive words yielded faster recognition, while negative words resulted in slower responses.
• Emotional content processing was affected by valence, but seemed resilient to script variations.

Conclusions:

• Script type influences visual word recognition, with standard scripts facilitating faster processing.
• Emotional valence significantly modulates lexical access, accelerating positive content and decelerating negative content.
• Despite script differences, the emotional impact of words appears to maintain its influence on cognitive processing.