Unpleasant words can affect the detection of morphosyntactic errors: An ERP study on individual differences

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Research on early agreement computation has explored its interaction with word emotionality.
• Conflicting findings exist regarding interactive effects in the left anterior negativity (LAN) component.
• Individual differences in neural patterns during grammatical processing are increasingly recognized.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if the interaction between grammaticality and emotionality depends on specific neural profiles.
• To explore how individual neural differences affect the processing of grammatical agreement and emotional content.

Main Methods:

• Sixty-one Spanish female native speakers performed a noun phrase agreement judgment task.
• Stimuli included determiners, nouns, and adjectives varying in gender agreement and emotionality (unpleasant/neutral).
• Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to analyze neural responses.

Main Results:

• Two distinct neural profiles emerged: negative dominance (larger LAN for ungrammatical stimuli) and positive dominance (larger P600 for ungrammatical stimuli).
• The negative dominance group showed early grammaticality effects (around 200ms) with parallel processing of grammar and emotion (LAN/N400).
• The positive dominance group exhibited an early interaction (around 200ms), with grammaticality effects only for unpleasant words.

Conclusions:

• Individual differences significantly modulate the neural interplay between grammar and emotion.
• The study supports distinct processing pathways based on neural profiles, affecting the timing and nature of interactions.
• Future syntactic processing research should incorporate individual neural variability.