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  -