Dumay, N. 1 , Sharma, D. 2 , Kellen, N. 2 & Abdelrahim, S. 2
1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain
2 School of Psychology, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
This study examines how words' emotional attributes affect linguistic processing and whether their acquisition requires consolidation. Participants were exposed to two sets of associations between made-up words (e.g., 'knirck'), both spoken and written, and pictures with either an emotionally negative or a neutral content (e.g., 'a dead sheep' vs. 'a pizza'). One set of associations was learnt one week before the test, giving them more time/sleep to consolidate; the other set was learnt either 6hrs or immediately before the test. The novel words' ability to evoke their emotional attributes was assessed using both a Stroop-like colour identification task (which did not work) and an auditory analog, i.e., pause detection. Picture-word association showed poorer memory for negative than neutral words and similar forgetting in both conditions. In striking contrast, pause detection revealed no emotionality effect for words learnt either 6hrs or immediately before the test (-4 and -3 ms), but robust interference (+30 ms) for seven-day old negative compared to neutral words. These findings indicate that it takes words' emotional attributes between 6hrs and seven days to be fully operational. Given our rotated design, they also demonstrate that alarming words produce a cost in attentional tasks orthogonal to word processing.