Musical Emotion Modulates Concrete and Abstract Word Processing: Evidence from ERPs

Background/Objectives: Cross-modal emotional priming effects of music on language have been widely demonstrated, but how musical emotion interacts with different types of conceptual representation remains unclear. This study examined whether emotional musical contexts exert differential influences on the processing of concrete and abstract words, whose processing is thought to depend to different degrees on sensorimotor and affective experience. Methods: Two ERP experiments were conducted using a long stimulus-onset asynchrony priming paradigm with two independent groups of participants. In Experiment 1, 24 female participants performed valence judgments on concrete words following positive or negative musical primes. In Experiment 2, 24 female participants completed the same task with abstract words. ERP components associated with early perceptual or attentional processing, semantic processing, and later evaluative or integrative processing were analyzed. Results: Musical emotion modulated the processing of both concrete and abstract words, but the temporal patterns differed. For concrete words, music-word valence-congruency effects were mainly observed following negative music primes, with negative words eliciting larger P2 and late positive component amplitudes than positive words. Musical context also modulated the N400 amplitudes, suggesting effects across multiple processing stages. For abstract words, no reliable interaction was observed in the P2 or N400 time windows. Instead, a late-stage valence effect emerged mainly following positive music primes, with negative words eliciting larger late positive component amplitudes than positive words. Conclusions: These findings suggest that musical emotion interacts with concrete and abstract word processing through distinct temporal patterns. The results offer preliminary support for the contextual compensation hypothesis, suggesting that concrete words may be more sensitive to external musical contexts during emotional processing, whereas abstract words appear to rely more on later-stage emotional integration. These findings therefore highlight context-dependent effects of musical emotion and music-word valence congruency on concrete and abstract word processing.