Piñeiro, A. 1 , Ledo, A. 1 , Díaz, M. 1 , García Orza, J. 2 & Fraga, I. 1
1 Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
2 Universidad de Málaga
Previous studies have shown that arousal plays a clear role in Spanish when participants have to complete ambiguous sentences with the structure ‘NP-de-NP + RC…’ (e.g., Los vecinos intentaron detener la guerra de la calle que…), if one of the two antecedents is an emotional word (Fraga, Piñeiro, Redondo & Acuña-Fariña, 2008). In short, high arousal nouns tend to attract the RC significantly wherever they are (NP1 vs. NP2). The main aims of this piece of research were, firstly, to clarify to what extent affective valence influences the process of disambiguation in the sentence completion task when such words are neutral in terms of arousal, and secondly, to determine whether there are any differences between positive and negative high arousal words in their ability to attract the RC which participants have to complete. Two sentence completion studies were carried out. In the first one, there were five experimental conditions, two of them being of special interest for our goals, since they included a NP1 that was either positive or negative and a NP2 with a non emotional noun (i.e, neutral in terms of both valence and arousal). In the second study there were three experimental conditions in all of which the arousal level of the words was kept constant (neutral). Results showed that, although both pleasant and unpleasant words in NP1 attracted the RC, participants preferred to complete sentences following the high-attachment strategy when faced with pleasant nouns significantly more than when they were faced with unpleasant ones. Furthermore, in the absence of high arousal words, pleasant nouns in comparison to neutral ones were preferred as subjects of the RC independently of their being either in the NP1 or in the NP2. That is, when NP2 contains a positive word participants change their preference towards a late closure strategy.