TY  - JOUR
A1  - Czerwon, Beate
A1  - Hohlfeld, Annette
A1  - Wiese, Heike
A1  - Werheid, Katja
T1  - Syntactic structural parallelisms influence processing of positive stimuli evidence from cross-modal ERP priming
JF  - International journal of psychophysiology
N2  - Language can strongly influence the emotional state of the recipient. In contrast to the broad body of experimental and neuroscientific research on semantic information and prosodic speech, the emotional impact of grammatical structure has rarely been investigated. One reason for this might be, that measuring effects of syntactic structure involves the use of complex stimuli, for which the emotional impact of grammar is difficult to isolate. In the present experiment we examined the emotional impact of structural parallelisms, that is, repetitions of syntactic features, on the emotion-sensitive "late positive potential" (LPP) with a cross-modal priming paradigm. Primes were auditory presented nonsense sentences which included grammatical-syntactic parallelisms. Visual targets were positive, neutral, and negative faces, to be classified as emotional or non-emotional by the participants. Electrophysiology revealed diminished LPP amplitudes for positive faces following parallel primes. Thus, our findings suggest that grammatical structure creates an emotional context that facilitates processing of positive emotional information.
KW  - Language
KW  - Emotion
KW  - Priming
KW  - ERP
KW  - Late positive potential
KW  - Structural parallelisms
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2012.10.014
SN  - 0167-8760
SN  - 1872-7697
VL  - 87
IS  - 1
SP  - 28
EP  - 34
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Budd, Mary-Jane
A1  - Paulmann, Silke
A1  - Barry, Christopher
A1  - Clahsen, Harald
T1  - Brain potentials during language production in children and adults - an ERP study of the English past tense
JF  - Brain & language : a journal of the neurobiology of language
N2  - The current study examines the neural correlates of 8-to-12-year-old children and adults producing inflected word forms, specifically regular vs. irregular past-tense forms in English, using a silent production paradigm. ERPs were time-locked to a visual cue for silent production of either a regular or irregular past-tense form or a 3rd person singular present tense form of a given verb (e.g., walked/sang vs. walks/sings). Subsequently, another visual stimulus cued participants for an overt vocalization of their response. ERP results for the adult group revealed a negativity 300-450 ms after the silent-production cue for regular compared to irregular past-tense forms. There was no difference in the present form condition. Children's brain potentials revealed developmental changes, with the older children demonstrating more adult-like ERP responses than the younger ones. We interpret the observed ERP responses as reflecting combinatorial processing involved in regular (but not irregular) past-tense formation.
KW  - ERP
KW  - Morphology
KW  - Production
KW  - Children
KW  - Past tense
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2012.12.010
SN  - 0093-934X
SN  - 1090-2155
VL  - 127
IS  - 3
SP  - 345
EP  - 355
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  -