Emotion processing in concrete and abstract words: evidence from eye fixations during reading

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience of Language

Background:

• Word processing research explores how features like emotion, concreteness, and imageability affect reading.
• Yao et al. (2018) previously investigated these factors, but further replication and extension are valuable.

Purpose of the Study:

• To replicate and extend findings on the interplay of emotionality, concreteness, and imageability in word processing.
• To examine how these word characteristics influence eye fixation times during fluent reading.

Main Methods:

• A 3 (Emotion: negative, neutral, positive) x 2 (Concreteness: abstract, concrete) experimental design was employed.
• Eye movements of 63 participants were recorded while they read sentences containing matched target words.
• Gamma generalised linear mixed models were used for data analysis.

Main Results:

• Significant effects of both emotion and concreteness were found, with faster processing for emotional and concrete words.
• A significant interaction between emotion and concreteness was observed.
• Imageability modulated the emotion effect for abstract words, but not for concrete words, particularly in early fixation measures.

Conclusions:

• Findings support the multimodal induction hypothesis of word processing.
• The study highlights the complex interaction of emotionality, concreteness, and imageability in the initial stages of reading.
• Eye-tracking provides valuable insights into the immediate processes of word recognition.