Mathey, S. 1 , Dumay, N. 2 & Faurous, W. 1
1 Bordeaux University, France
2 BCBL, Spain
This research investigates whether the emotional attributes of lexical neighbours affect orthographic processing. Participants were presented with pseudoword strings that had only one orthographic neighbour which participants had to retrieve and articulate as soon as possible. This unique neighbour had either a negative and arousing, or a neutral and nonarousing content (e.g., leprasy-leprosy vs. galixy-galaxy). The two conditions were matched on many lexical and sublexical variables (i.e., grammatical class, length, frequency, phonological neighbourhood and bigram frequency). To test the generality of the findings, the experiment was carried out in both English and French. Given that the generation task required identifying the neighbour, we predicted that the faster and stronger activation of negative over neutral neighbours would return better performance for pseudowords that have an emotionally negative neighbour. This is exactly what we found, even after partialling the variance due to differences in onset consonants. Furthermore, the facilitation was enhanced in blocked compared to mixed presentations. Findings are interpreted in an interactive-activation model of visual word recognition and production incorporating an affective system. Ncount= 172