It's all in the delivery: Effects of context valence, arousal, and concreteness on visual word processing

Memory enhancement for emotional words is attributed to both valence and arousal

We do not memorize items in our surroundings with equal priority. Previous literature has widely shown that emotional stimuli are better remembered than neutral stimuli. However, given emotional stimuli and neutral stimuli often differ in both valence and arousal dimensions, it remains unclear whether the enhancement effects can be attributed to valence, or just to arousal. Importantly, most prior studies relied on a relatively small number of stimuli and non-emotional factors such as word length, imageability and other confounds were hard to control. To address these challenges, we analyzed multiple large databases of recognition memory and free recall tasks from previous research by items with many lexical and semantic covariates included, examining the effects of valence or arousal when controlling for each other. Our results showed a U-shaped relationship between valence and memory performance for both recognition and free recall, and a linear relationship between arousal and memory performance for both tasks. These findings showed that the memory enhancement effects can be attributed to both valence and arousal. We demonstrated these effects with generalizability across many stimuli and controlled for non-emotional factors. Together, these findings disentangle the contribution of valence and arousal in emotional memory enhancement effects and provide insights for current major theories of emotional memory.

The role of valence and arousal for phonological iconicity in the lexicon of German: a cross-validation study using pseudoword ratings

The notion of sound symbolism receives increasing interest in psycholinguistics. Recent research - including empirical effects of affective phonological iconicity on language processing (Adelman et al., 2018; Conrad et al., 2022) - suggested language codes affective meaning at a basic phonological level using specific phonemes as sublexical markers of emotion. Here, in a series of 8 rating-experiments, we investigate the sensitivity of language users to assumed affectively-iconic systematic distribution patterns of phonemes across the German vocabulary:After computing sublexical-affective-values (SAV) concerning valence and arousal for the entire German phoneme inventory according to occurrences of syllabic onsets, nuclei and codas in a large-scale affective normative lexical database, we constructed pseudoword material differing in SAV to test for subjective affective impressions.Results support affective iconicity as affective ratings mirrored sound-to-meaning correspondences in the lexical database. Varying SAV of otherwise semantically meaningless pseudowords altered affective impressions: Higher arousal was consistently assigned to pseudowords made of syllabic constituents more often used in high-arousal words - contrasted by less straightforward effects of valence SAV. Further disentangling specific differential effects of the two highly-related affective dimensions valence and arousal, our data clearly suggest arousal, rather than valence, as the relevant dimension driving affective iconicity effects.

Unseen but influential associates: Properties of words' associates influence lexical and semantic processing

In many models of lexical and semantic processing, it is assumed that single word processing is a function of the characteristics of the words presented and the distributional properties of the words' networks. Recent research suggests that semantic characteristics of a target word's associates may in fact influence target-word responses in lexical-semantic tasks. The present study extends that previous research to examine whether lexical and semantic properties of target-word associates are recruited during lexical and semantic decision tasks, and whether the type of associate information recruited varies as a function of task and concreteness of the target word. We found that lexical-semantic properties of words' first associates are related to accuracy of responses to words in lexical decision, and that semantic properties of words' first associates are related to both response time and accuracy in semantic decision. Further, these effects differ depending on the target word's concreteness. These findings provide new insight about the way words' associates contribute to semantic representation and processing, even though the associates are not actually presented, moving beyond previous assumptions about lexical-semantic processing of single words.

Role of Affective Factors and Concreteness on the Processing of Idioms

In this study, we asked how the emotional status, i.e., valence and arousal, and concreteness of idioms contribute to their processing. Additionally, we asked whether the contribution of emotional factors and concreteness is modulated by other linguistic constraints, specifically idiom familiarity and decomposability, that has been shown to impact idiom processing. Participants read short idiomatic phrases (e.g., he kicked the bucket), word-by-word and for comprehension while their reaction time was recorded. The results showed that the emotional status of idioms contribute to their processing and this contribution is modulated by familiarity and decomposability levels of idioms in different ways. In particular, the impact of valence (i.e., the degree an idiom is pleasant/unpleasant) was modulated by familiarity, and the impact of arousal was modulated by decomposability. We did not find strong evidence for the contribution of concreteness for idiom processing. Our findings are aligned with theories of semantic representation, which suggest that besides linguistic information, sensory-motor and affective information are fundamental in representing meaning.

Consensus Paper: Situated and Embodied Language Acquisition

Theories of embodied cognition postulate that perceptual, sensorimotor, and affective properties of concepts support language learning and processing. In this paper, we argue that language acquisition, as well as processing, is situated in addition to being embodied. In particular, first, it is the situated nature of initial language development that affords for the developing system to become embodied. Second, the situated nature of language use changes across development and adulthood. We provide evidence from empirical studies for embodied effects of perception, action, and valence as they apply to both embodied cognition and situated cognition across developmental stages. Although the evidence is limited, we urge researchers to consider differentiating embodied cognition within situated context, in order to better understand how these separate mechanisms interact for learning to occur. This delineation also provides further clarity to the study of classroom-based applications and the role of embodied and situated cognition in the study of developmental disorders. We argue that theories of language acquisition need to address for the complex situated context of real-world learning by completing a "circular notion": observing experimental paradigms in real-world settings and taking these observations to later refine lab-based experiments.

Extrapolation of affective norms using transformer-based neural networks and its application to experimental stimuli selection

Data on the emotionality of words is important for the selection of experimental stimuli and sentiment analysis on large bodies of text. While norms for valence and arousal have been thoroughly collected in English, most languages do not have access to such large datasets. Moreover, theoretical developments lead to new dimensions being proposed, the norms for which are only partially available. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based neural network architecture for semantic and emotional norms extrapolation that predicts a whole ensemble of norms at once while achieving state-of-the-art correlations with human judgements on each. We improve on the previous approaches with regards to the correlations with human judgments by Δr = 0.1 on average. We precisely discuss the limitations of norm extrapolation as a whole, with a special focus on the introduced model. Further, we propose a unique practical application of our model by proposing a method of stimuli selection which performs unsupervised control by picking words that match in their semantic content. As the proposed model can easily be applied to different languages, we provide norm extrapolations for English, Polish, Dutch, German, French, and Spanish. To aid researchers, we also provide access to the extrapolation networks through an accessible web application.

Semantic Prosody: How Neutral Words With Collocational Positivity/Negativity Color Evaluative Judgments

We like people and objects more when they are described in positive than in negative terms. But even seemingly neutral words can elicit positive or negative responses. This is the case for words that predominantly occur alongside positive (or negative) words in natural language. Despite lacking positivity/negativity when evaluated in isolation, such semantically prosodic words activate the evaluative associations of their usual company, which can color judgment in unrelated domains. For example, people are more likely to infer that “endocrination” (a fictional medical outcome) is negative when it is “caused” (a word with negative semantic prosody) rather than “produced” (a synonymous word without semantic prosody). We review what is known about the influence of semantically prosodic words and highlight their importance for judgment and decision making.

Word imageability influences the emotionality effect in episodic memory

This study examines how and to what extent imageability influences the effect of word emotionality in episodic memory. A total of 52 young adults successively performed a free recall task and a recognition task in which word emotionality and imageability were orthogonally manipulated across six conditions of French words: low-imageability positive words (e.g., éloge [praise]), low-imageability negative words (e.g., viral [viral]), low-imageability neutral words (e.g., global [global]), high-imageability positive words (e.g., ourson [teddy]), high-imageability negative words (e.g., tornade [tornado]), and low-imageability neutral words (e.g., noyau [core]). The results from both the recall and the recognition memory tasks show that word imageability enhances memory performance. Importantly, word imageability interacted with word emotionality in both tasks. Specifically, we found that the advantage of emotional over neutral words in episodic memory performance emerged for high-imageability words only, as did the advantage of positive over negative words. These results highlight the role of imageability in the mechanisms underlying emotional word episodic memory.

Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep

In everyday language, concepts appear alongside (i.e., collocate with) related concepts. Societal biases often emerge in these collocations; e.g., female (vs. male) names collocate with art- (vs. science-) related concepts, and African American (vs. White American) names collocate with negative (vs. positive) concepts. It is unknown whether such collocations merely reflect societal biases or contribute to them. Concepts that are themselves neutral in valence but nevertheless collocate with valenced concepts provide a unique opportunity to address this question. For example, when asked, most people evaluate the concept "cause" as neutral, but "cause" is frequently followed by negative concepts (e.g., death, pain, and trouble). We use such semantically prosodic concepts to test the influence of collocation on the emergence of implicit bias: do neutral concepts that frequently collocate with valenced concepts have corresponding implicit bias? In evaluative priming tasks, participants evaluated positive/negative nouns (Study 1) or pictures (Study 2) after seeing verb primes that were (a) strongly valenced (e.g., hate and comfort), (b) neutral in valence but collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., ease and gain), or (c) neutral in valence and not collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., reply and describe). Throughout, neutral primes with positive (negative) collocates facilitated the evaluation of positive (negative) targets much like strongly valenced primes, whereas neutral primes without valenced collocates did not. That neutral concepts with valenced collocates parallel the influence of valenced concepts suggests that their collocations in natural language may be sufficient for fostering implicit bias. Societal implications of the causal embedding hypothesis are discussed.

Relating emotional variables to recognition memory performance: a large-scale re-analysis of megastudy data

The megastudy paradigm has become an important tool for cognitive science. One advantage to the megastudy is that existing data can be reanalysed in light of novel hypotheses. In the current study, recognition memory data for 4819 words were obtained. Multiple regression analyses assessed the influence of emotional variables on recognition memory performance (i.e., hits minus false alarm rates H-FAs) for the words. The predictor variables included valence, arousal, extremity of valence (the degree of negative or positive meaning), context valence (the degree to which a word typically appears in positive or negative contexts), context arousal (how emotionally reactive are contexts in which the word appears), and context extremity of valence (the degree of this typical emotional context). This study extended earlier work by implementing more thorough controls, maximising the number of words, assessing a more comprehensive set of emotional variables, and introducing the context extremity of valence variable. We found extremity of valence, context extremity of valence, context valence, and context arousal all were significant predictors of H-FAs. We interpret the results in terms of the dual-coding theory and hub and spoke model. We also explain how single-process models could accommodate the results in terms of context diversity.

Building semantic memory from embodied and distributional language experience

Humans seamlessly make sense of a rapidly changing environment, using a seemingly limitless knowledgebase to recognize and adapt to most situations we encounter. This knowledgebase is called semantic memory. Embodied cognition theories suggest that we represent this knowledge through simulation: understanding the meaning of coffee entails reinstantiating the neural states involved in touching, smelling, seeing, and drinking coffee. Distributional semantic theories suggest that we are sensitive to statistical regularities in natural language, and that a cognitive mechanism picks up on these regularities and transforms them into usable semantic representations reflecting the contextual usage of language. These appear to present contrasting views on semantic memory, but do they? Recent years have seen a push toward combining these approaches under a common framework. These hybrid approaches augment our understanding of semantic memory in important ways, but current versions remain unsatisfactory in part because they treat sensory-perceptual and distributional-linguistic data as interacting but distinct types of data that must be combined. We synthesize several approaches which, taken together, suggest that linguistic and embodied experience should instead be considered as inseparably entangled: just as sensory and perceptual systems are reactivated to understand meaning, so are experience-based representations endemic to linguistic processing; further, sensory-perceptual experience is susceptible to the same distributional principles as language experience. This conclusion produces a characterization of semantic memory that accounts for the interdependencies between linguistic and embodied data that arise across multiple timescales, giving rise to concept representations that reflect our shared and unique experiences. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Language Neuroscience > Cognition Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain.