Emotionality effects in ambiguous word recognition: The crucial role of the affective congruence between distinct meanings of ambiguous words

Abstract

There is substantial evidence that affectively charged words (e.g., party or gun) are processed differently from neutral words (e.g., pen), although there are also inconsistent findings in the field. Some lexical or semantic variables might explain such inconsistencies, due to the possible modulation of affective word processing by these variables. The aim of the present study was to examine the extent to which affective word processing is modulated by semantic ambiguity. We conducted a large lexical decision study including semantically ambiguous words (e.g., cataract) and semantically unambiguous words (e.g., terrorism), analyzing the extent to which reaction times (RTs) were influenced by their affective properties. The findings revealed a valence effect in which positive valence made RTs faster while negative valence slowed them. The valence effect diminished as the semantic ambiguity of words increased. This decrease did not affect all ambiguous words, but was observed mainly in ambiguous words with incongruent affective meanings. These results highlight the need to consider the affective properties of the distinct meanings of ambiguous words in research on affective word processing.

Individual differences in visual word recognition: the role of epistemically unwarranted beliefs on affective processing and signal detection

“…Regarding arousal, mixed findings have been reported too: there are reports of facilitating (e.g., Recio et al, 2014), inhibitory (e.g., Kuperman et al, 2014) and null effects (e.g., Rodríguez-Ferreiro & Davies, 2019). Even though other word properties may contribute to these inconsistencies [e.g., concreteness (see Kousta et al, 2011;Borghi et al, 2017), semantic ambiguity (see Ferré et al, 2021) and word frequency (see Barriga-Paulino et al, 2022)], subjects' individual differences in relation to affective processing could also have a role in explaining these conflicting results (Mueller & Kuchinke, 2016;Silva et al, 2012). Just to give an example, in the study of Silva et al (2012), participants with high-and low-disgust sensitivity performed a lexical decision task (LDT) which included both negative disgustrelated words and neutral words.…”