Neural correlates of affective contributions to lexical decisions in children and adults

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to investigate whether 6–9-year old children and adults show similar neural responses to affective words. An event-related neuroimaging paradigm was used in which both age cohorts performed the same auditory lexical decision task (LDT). The results show similarities in (auditory) lexico-semantic network activation as well as in areas associated with affective information. In both age cohorts’ activations were stronger for positive than for negative words, thus exhibiting a positivity superiority effect. Children showed less activation in areas associated with affective information in response to all three valence categories than adults. Our results are discussed in the light of computational models of word recognition, and previous findings of affective contributions to LDT in adults.

Computational Models of Readers' Apperceptive Mass

“…Thus, prediction accuracy increased from RA1 to RA3, but sdewac outperformed all three CL models. This is not surprising since, on the one hand, adults usually perform better in any test than children, and on the other hand, because valence ratings in children are not solely based on the books they read, but also on multiple other sources of information, including their social interactions with adults (Sylvester et al, 2016 , 2021a , b ).…”

“…To what extent the present exemplary data can be generalized to other emotion terms and book corpora (e.g., GLEC), and whether they correspond with the development of the emotion term vocabulary in children are key questions for future research. Whereas the neural and affective-cognitive processes underlying the codevelopment of language and emotion is still a badly underresearched area of psychology and the cognitive neurosciences (e.g., Sylvester et al, 2016 , 2021a , b ), a recent study suggests that the emotion vocabulary of children of age 4–11 doubles about every second year (Nook et al, 2017 , 2020 ). According to this study, emotion representations develop from a unidimensional focus on valence to a bidimensional focus on both valence and arousal from age 6 to 25.…”

“…For the valence rating task, we chose the “kidBAWL” dataset (Sylvester et al, 2016 , 2021a , b ) and correlated the computed affective-aesthetic potential (AAP) values for each word—following the procedure outlined in previous work (Jacobs, 2017 , 2019 )—with the children's rating data. The AAP is a potential, that is, a theoretical measure independent of reader responses, based on cosine similarities between the vectors of a given test word and those of a set of 120 predefined labels representing positive and negative affective-aesthetic concepts.…”

Radical neuroconstructivism: a framework to combine the how and what of teaching and learning?

“…• Speech perception and comprehension (e.g., Friederici and Männel, 2013) • Understands role of pointing (e.g., Gredebäck et al, 2010) • Semantic and syntactic sentence processing (Schneider and Maguire, 2019) • Speech discrimination and later grammar (Zhao et al, 2021) • Syntax (Klein et al, 2022) Productive language • Speech imitation (spontaneous) (e.g., Garnier et al, 2013;Kokkinaki and Vitalaki, 2013;Szczepek Reed, 2020) • Adjective generation (e.g., Zhang and Pylkkänen, 2018) • Affective contributions to lexical decisions (e.g., Sylvester et al, 2021) • First and second language speech (e.g., Petitto et al, 2012;Cristia et al, 2014) • From auditory to speech perception (e.g., Dehaene-Lambertz et al, 2005) • High frequency sounds, novel sounds (e.g., Gervain et al, 2016) • Human action sounds vs. other sounds (e.g., Geangu et al, 2015) • Intelligible speech (e.g., Khandaker, 2015;Friederici et al, 2017).…”

The Elephant in the Room: A Systematic Review of Stimulus Control in Neuro-Measurement Studies on Figurative Language Processing

“…Citron et al, 2016a). Differently valenced expressions have also been shown to result in different activation patters in both children and adults (Sylvester et al, 2021) and several studies found metaphors to be more emotional than literal expressions (Gibbs, 2002;Citron and Goldberg, 2014;Mohammad et al, 2016).…”