Faurous, W. 1 , Dumay, N. 2 & Mathey, S. 1
1 Université Bordeaux Segalen Laboratoie de psychologie "Santé et Qualité de vie" EA 4139
2 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
This research explores how words' emotional attributes affect linguistic processing and whether their acquisition requires consolidation. French-speakers were repeatedly exposed to associations between written made up words (e.g., 'évrade') and pictures with either an emotionally negative or a neutral content (e.g., 'a growling pitbull' vs. 'a spoon'). The ability of the novel orthographic forms to activate their emotional attributes was then tested immediately and retested after a week. A stroop-like colour identification task showed facilitation for negative compared to neutral words at test (13 ms), but interference at retest (16 ms). In line with the idea that what had consolidated has to do with more than just arousing power of the stimuli, an old/new recognition task administered only at retest revealed an interaction between participants' general level of anxiety and emotional content: whereas more anxious participants took longer to recognize negative than neutral words, less anxious participants showed the reverse pattern. Altogether, these results indicate that words' emotional attributes need consolidation before they can be activated by the written input; given the fully rotated nature of our design, they also show that negative stimuli freeze participants under attentional tasks that do not focus on word identity.